







pREsi;,\Ti;n in 



ELEBRATION 
PROCEEDINGS «f ti,e 

One Hundred and Fiftieth 
Annivers2iry of the Town of 

New Ipswich 

New Hd^mpshire ^ 



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Au|(ust 26 to 28 
1900 



^7 



CELEBRATION PROCEEDINGS 



ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH 
ANNIVERSARY 



'^^ 



NEW IPSWICH, N. H. 



AUGUST 26-28, 1900. 



1*1 



' There is a spot of earth supremely hlest,i . 
A dearer, sweeter spot than all the rest."\ » 



COMPILED BY FREDERIC WILLIAM JONES, A. M., M. D. 



NEW IPSWICH, N. H.: 

PUBLISHED BV THE CELEBRATION COMMITTEE. 
1900. 



,NtNi 



Sentinel Printing Company, 
FiTCHBURG, Mass. 



P 

4 O'OI 



DEDICATED TO THE 

SONS AND DAUGHTERS 

OF 

NEW IPSWICH, N. H. 



lE'TRODTJCTIOK. 



The selectmen of New Ipswich early in the year considered the pro- 
position for a celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of 
the incorporation of the town. In order to commemorate this event, a 
special committee of twelve citizens was appointed. 

This committee immediately organized, choosing a chairman, W. L. 
Phelps, a secretary, H. J. Moore, and a treasurer, E. O. Marshall. Ses- 
sions were held at frequent intervals, and the arduous work of raising the 
requisite funds carefully considered. Each member was provided with a 
paper for the solicitation of subscriptions. This was imperative, because 
there was no appropriation and the financial situation looked dubious. 

The hearty and willing co-operation of all soon solved the problem. 
Letters announcing the proposed celebration were sent broadcast to the 
loyal sons and daughters of the town, as well as to former residents widely 
scattered over the United States, and personal appeals were also made to 
the citizens. This had the desired effect and soon the generous subscrip- 
tions began to materialize in such an amount that the celebration commit- 
tee made adequate preparations to observe the anniversary with appropri- 
ate exercises. The genial chairman, Wilbur L. Phelps, deserves especial 
praise for his kindness and courtesy while presiding. 

The committee heartily entered into the plans for the realization and 
perfection of a program that would attract and please the visitors and 
participants. 

The orator. Prof. Charles H. Chandler, and the poet, Timothy Perry, 
Esq., were natives of the town. 

Preliminary services were held on the Sabbath previous in the Con- 
gregational church, where a number of eminent and scholarly clergymen 
assembled and addressed a congregation of people who filled the building 
to its utmost capacity, while an old-fashioned choir aided by an old- 
fashioned orchestra enriched the occasion with entrancing song and music. 

His Excellency, Gov. F'rank \V. Rollins, the father of " Old Home 
Week," seven members of his staff, Capt. Jonas Nutting Post, No. 53, 



6 PROCEEDINGS. 

G. A. R., the Peterboro Cavalry, the Lyndeboro Artillery, the local Fire 
Department, and a list of invited guests willingly responded and assured 
their presence on the day of the celebration. 

The committee strenuously labored to celebrate with due honor this 
notable occasion under the most auspicious influences, and its culmination 
was largely due to the kindly energy of those who so materially responded 
and offered their financial aid. 

To all of these the committee extend most cordial thanks, also to 
the Governor, his staff, all the military organizations, the G. A. R. Post, 
and the Fire Department, who were instrumental in reviewing the glories 
of the old historic town and honoring its noble ancestry. 

" Long live the good town, giving out year by year, 
Recruits to true maniioocl and womanhood dear." 

F. W. Jones. 
New Ipswich, N. H., Sept. 21, 1900. 



PROCEEDINGS. 



THE ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY 
COMMITTEE. 



Wilbur L. Phelps, 
Joseph A. Wheeler, 
Edward O. Marshall, 
John Preston, 
Harry J. Moore, 
George R. Barrett, 



Frederic W. Jones, 
Albert F. Walker, 
Lauriston M. p. Hardy, 
Charles Wheeler, 
George S. Wheeler, 
Caroline F. Barr. 



PROCEEDINGS. 

SUBSCRIBERS TO THE CELEBRATION FUND. 
Full Amount Received, $949.35. 



J. L. Hildreth, 
William E. Davis, 
Brown Brothers, 
John W. Cumrnings, 
Rodney Wallace, 
Charles M. Wheeler, 
Chauncy Perry, 
Timothy Perry, 
James H. Farwell, 
Henry R. Reed, 
Joseph Silver, Jr., 
G. H. Wheeler, 
Royal E. Farwell, 

F. W. Jones, 
Elizabeth M. Barrett, 
George R. Barrett, 
R. H. Stearns, 
Ralph E. Parker, 
W^illiam A. Preston, 
Frank W. Preston, 
Henry T. Champney, 
J. M. Marsh, 
Hattie P. McKown, 
O. H. Perry, 

J. W. Bullard, 
M. F. Deane, 
L. M. Barr, 
James B. Davis, 
Emma Hardison, 
Edwin Leedham, 
J. E. F. Marsh, 

G. F. Lougee, 



Oliver Tenney, 
H. M. Brooks, 
Frank L. Mansfield, 
C. Fred Jowders, 
E. H. Farwell, 
J. M. Burton, 
W. N. Thompson, 
C. F. RiLssell, 
A. L. Travis, 
William Boynton, 
John N. Wilkinson, 
E. Frederick, 
Stephen Wheeler, 
James C. Chandler, 
J. A. Wheeler, 
George S. Wheeler, 

E. M. Fox, 
John Bourgault, 
P. J. LeCourt, 
H. J. Moore, 
John Foster, 

C. S. Moore, 
W. L. Clark, 
G. L. Muzzey, 
R. A. Hale, 
A. F. Walker, 
Mary J. Tabraham, 
William R. Thompson, 
Mr. and Mrs. Fred Moore, 

F. W. Chapman, 

E. C. Stowe, 

F. H. Whittemore, 



PROCEEDINGS. 



Charles H. Hardy, 
Albert L. Howe, 
George R. Jacquith, 
L. W. Newell, 

D. E. Putnam, 
N. O. Whitney, 
George C. Ramsdell, 
L. H. Hodgman, 
H. W. Whitney, 
Louisa F. Rand, 
Martha A. Taylor, 
William Wheeler, 
Charles F. Wheeler, 
Guy C. Blanchard, 
John Parmenter, 

E. F. Blanchard, 
L. E. Ferrin, 
M. T. Robbins, 
Nettie Whittemore, 
Charles S. Wheeler, 
B. A. Robbins, 
Edw. R. Wheeler, 
Charles Wheeler, 
Alice Edson, 

J. L. Chandler, 
A. A. Woodward, 
E. H. Taylor, 
James Barr Ames, 
George D. Burton, 
Myron Taylor, 
J. L. Wolcott, 



William E. Preston, 
Edward O. Marshall, 
Charles Houghton, 
I. W. Chick, 
F. N. Gibson, 
Charles S. Davis, 
Eugene L. Clark, 
Sanders Brothers, 
Mary H. Hersey, 
Mary D. Barrett, 
Sarah F. Hubbard, 
Andrew Bateman, 
Mrs. N. W. Farley, 
Perley B. Davis, 
Henry Ames Blood, 
Mrs. James Tucker, 
Harriet King, 
Silas Boyce, 
Mr. Holden, 
Sarah B. Perry, 
F. B. Perry, 
Mary B. Gibson, 
Elizabeth Gould, 
Mrs. Hooper, 
George Parker, 
Samuel Gates, 
Ella Russell Freeman, 
Arthur Farley, 
Charles H. Allen, 
L. M. P. Hardy. 



10 



PROCEEDINGS. 



INVITED GUESTS. 



Gov. Frank W. Rollins, 
Gen. W. E. Spalding, 
Col. E. S. Head, 
Col. Sam Lewis, 



Gen. A. D. Ayling, 
Gen. H. H. Dudley, 
Col. J. M. Sargent, 
Col. Joseph H. Coit, 



Capt. Charles Davis and Company of Peterboro Cavalry, 
Capt. Edward Ross and Company of Lyndeboro Artillery, 
Commander A. L. Travis and Capt. Jonas Nutting Post, No. 53, 
G. A. R. 



New Ipswich Fire Department, 

Rev. Cecil F. P. Bancroft, 

Rev. F. W. Greene, 

Hon. Rodney Wallace, 

Hon. R. H. Stearns, 

Mr. John C. Hildreth, 

Mr. S. Arthur Bent, 

Rev. Perley B. Davis, 

Mr. Lucius Sanders, 

Capt. John Hubbard, 

Prof. James Barr Ames, 

Mr. Nathaniel Doane, 

Judge E. E. Parker, 

Hon. Isaac C. Stearns, 



Rev. Calvin Cutler, 

John Herbert, Esq. 

Rev. William R. Thompson, 

Mr. Roby Fletcher, 

Mr. William A. Preston, 

Judge Chauncy Perry, 

Mr. George R. Barrett, 

Mr. Alfred H. Brown, 

Mrs. Sarah F. Hubbard, 

Maj. D. E. Proctor, 

Hon. Frank G. Clarke, 

Rev. John S. Brown, 

Prof. Charles H. Chandler. 



Timothy Perry, Esq., 

Mr. William J. Greenman and Mr. Daniel G. Murphy, caterers at 
New Ipswich centennial dinner in 1850. 



SUNDAY, AUGUST 26. 



ORDER OF EXERCISES AT THE SERVICE IN THE 
CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH. 

Rev. Cecil F. P. Bancroft Presiding. 



Hymn, " Sweet is the day of sacred rest." Portland. 

Prayer, Rev. William R. Thompson. 

Hymn, "Come, my beloved, haste away." Invitation. 

Reading of Old Testament Scriptures by Rev. F. W. Greene, also 
from Erasmus' Version of New Testament, London edition, 1548. 

Hymn, " While shepherds watched their flocks by night." Sher- 
burne. 

Rev. C. F. P. Bancroft read notices, also Rev. George F. Mer- 
riam's letter, and made an address. 

Hymn, "Spare us, O Lord, aloud we cry." Complaint. 

Rev. Calvin Cutler made an address and followed it with prayer. 

Anthem, " Strike the cymbal." 

John Herbert, Esq., gave an address. 

Hymn, " How long, dear Saviour, O, how long?" Northfield. 

Hymn, "Lord, what a thoughtless wretch was I." Greenwich. 

Rev. Frederick W. Greene's address. 

Hymn, " Gone are those great and good." Pierpont. 

Benediction pronounced by Rev. Dr. Bancroft. 



THE SABBATH SERYIOES. 



" Where'er I roam, whatever realms to see, 
My heart untravelled fondly turns to thee." 

Gladsome skies never welcomed a more beautiful day than the Sab- 
bath of August 26, 1900, when the keynote of the celebration was struck, 
and amidst a magnificent display of bunting and gorgeous decorations, a 
large assemblage convened in the Congregational church. The facade of 
the building was attractively decorated, and a corps of able and efficient 
ushers soon filled the edifice with people. Happiness, good will, and 
fraternal sympathy beamed in the faces of the great assemblage. 

Over the pulpit was the motto, "God be with you till we meet 
again." On either side were the dates 1750 and 1900. 

The gallery, in which were seated the choir and orchestra under the 
director, William Willis Clark of Boston, a grandson and son of former 
leaders of the choir, was filled with ladies and gentlemen, who most 
heartily entered into the spirit of the day and carried by their songs all 
listeners on the wings of imagination to the days of yore. 

Miss Sarah F. Lee, daughter of the late Rev. Samuel Lee, arranged 
the Sunday program. Rev. Cecil F. P. Bancroft of Andover, Mass., 
presided. 

Hymn, "Sweet is the day of sacred rest." Portland. 

Rev. William R. Thompson, a former pastor of the Baptist church, 
offered the opening prayer. 

Hymn, "Come, my beloved, haste away." Invitation. 

Rev. ¥. W. Greene of Middletown, Conn., a great-grandson of Rev. 
Laban Ainsworth, who filled a pastorate of 75 years in Jaffrey, N. H., 
the longest one on record in the United States, read the 84th Psalm, and 



PROCEEDINGS. 13 

from the 1 6th chapter of Matthew, in a copy of Erasmus' version of the 
New Testament, from the 21st verse to the 29th, from Hebrews 11th 
chapter, verses 8-10, 13—16, and from the 39th to 2d verse of chapter 
12th. This volume was published in London in 1548, and was used and 
read from by Rev. Samuel Lee on the occasion of the one hundredth 
anniversary of this town. 

Hymn, " While shepherds watched their flocks by night." Sher- 
burne. 

Rev. Cecil F. P. Bancroft read the morning notices and also a letter 
from Rev. George F. Merriam of Mt. Kisco, N. Y., who cherished tender 
memories of his pastoral duties while connected with the New Ipswich 
Congregational church. 

It was the original intention to have had Hon. R. H. Stearns, Rev. 
Perley B. Davis and Earle W. Westgate, a former principal of Appleton 
Academy, present, but previous engagements prevented. 

REMARKS BY REV. CECIL F. P. BANCROFT. 

It is very fitting that the celebration of the settlement of this town 
one hundred and fifty years ago should be recognized by this church, and 
that it should begin with a special religious observance. In that early 
day church and state were so intimately united as to be almost identical. 
At the first meeting of the proprietors of this township, June 20, 1750, 
it was "Voted to choose a committee to provide a proper person to preach 
in said town." The actual organization of the church was delayed by 
various hindrances ten years, when the first minister, the godly Stephen 
Farrar, was ordained and settled. But previously preaching had been 
maintained, and a meeting-house had been built by general taxation. It 
was not till 1824, the half-way date in the history of our town, that the 
present system of voluntary support of the churches was fully established 
in this community ; and not till some years after that the parish acquired 
from the town the ownership of the meeting-house. At present it is an 
established principle in American life that church and state must be sep- 
arate; when this town was young, church and state were one; the church 
was supported, as now our schools, highways, courts, and legislation are 
supported, at the public charge. 

I esteem it a great honor to be invited to preside on this occasion. 



14 PROCEEDINGS. 

and to introduce the speakers who are to follow me. I am sustained in 
part by my interest in this, my native town, and in this church. My 
earliest recollections of public worship are connected with this edifice. 
Here our large household worshipped, scattered now, and some of them 
long since worshippers in "the house not made with hands." The Sun- 
day morning drive from our somewhat distant and isolated home in Wilder 
village, — the irreverent at that time called it by a less attractive name, — 
the converging lines of numerous vehicles and pedestrians going up to the 
house of God, the pealing of the deep-toned bell, which I a few years 
afterward learned to ring, the general aspect of cheerfulness, neighborli- 
ness, bustle, and Sunday respectability of dress and manners, made a deep 
impression on my childish mind. It is easy for some of you to recall with 
me the old meeting-house, then of one lofty story instead of two as at 
present, with the wide gallery running around three sides, and the double 
row of numerous windows, which I seem again to hear rattling in 
the winter wind. The square pews along the walls and the slips in the 
middle, the very pew in which we sat, the faces and even the dress of 
some who sat in adjacent pews, the hinged seats which went down some- 
times with a slam after the long prayer, the foot-stoves in great request 
in winter days, and the choir in the south gallery, are all very vividly 
before me, — especially the orchestra, two or three violins, the 'cello which 
my father played, a double-bass viol, a clarinet, and two or three brass 
instruments, which sustained the voices. It was very impressive and 
very inspiring, for the Clark family and the Stearns family were the same 
musical folk as in the next generation. But the most awesome thing was 
the lofty pulpit, a square structure, large enough, it seemed to me, for a 
church in itself, with two entrance doors right and left of the communion 
table, leading into the deep unknown, finished at the top with rich, red 
velvet cushions, while behind were festooned in a great arch red damask 
draperies. I used to watch with solemn curiosity the minister coming 
down the broad aisle, entering one of the doors which closed behind him, 
and then after a dread interval see him rising out of the mysterious 
arcanum ; first the head became visible, then the shoulders, and finally 
the full half-length. I used to wonder by what mechanical or super- 
natural agency all this was brought to pass. It sometimes seemed as if 
he must have been upborne by angels' wings. 

My father was an officer in this church for many years, till he re- 
moved to an adjoining town. He was active in the reconstruction of this 
building, and 1 think was on the building committee. When it was re- 



PROCEEDINGS. 16 

dedicated I joined my father and eldest sister in the choir, attempting 
rather helplessly, as I remember, the alto score. Our new sittings were 
on the other side of the church, and in the next pew sat Perley B. Davis, 
whom we hoped to hear to-day as one of the children of this church who 
have had a long, able, and successful ministry. I should be false alike to 
memory and affection if I failed to make grateful mention of the uplift, 
intellectual and spiritual, which I received here from the sermons of the 
minister of my childhood and youth, the Rev. Samuel Lee. 

I must not dwell longer on personal recollections, even though they 
be typical and awake responsive echoes in your memory. I have spoken 
of the church as an integral part of the early life of this community. 
Notwithstanding the separation of church and state, it is so still. The 
real influence abides under new forms. In pioneer days the church was 
the social center, and its educational power was only less than its religious. 
I sometimes allow myself to wonder what would have been the history 
of this town if the church had not been established and maintained from 
that day to this. The church and the academy have united for the pro- 
motion of the higher life of this community. They have stood consist- 
ently and openly for those moral qualities in our citizens which make for 
right living and good government, and the church has been the highest 
expression of obedience to law, unselfish devotion to the public welfare, 
and abounding sympathy and beneficence for those who are in trouble or 
want. There is a gloomy side in the history of this church, — the long 
and bitter controversies over matters which seem in the far distance not 
worth the contention, but this sharp division of opinion among brethren 
has been an evidence of conscience, of independence and freedom of opin- 
ion, whether the quarrel was over the location of the meeting-house, or 
the half-way covenant, or ministerial taxes, or an erring brother, or the 
minister. A community unblessed by the sanctuary, the ministry of the 
word and the sacraments, has not been a good place in which to grow in 
grace and to bring up children, nor to do business. Generations of reli- 
gious families worshipping God and sustaining the institutions of the 
church have brought our country forward to its present intelligence, 
virtue, and prosperity. Generations of families opposing or neglecting the 
churches have not been tried in this country, and it is not wise to prophesy 
what would follow, but this we may say, that the character of our honest, 
frugal, industrious, patriotic, church-going, and religious ancestors is a 
legacy in which we proudly and gratefully stand to-day, and an inherit- 
ance which most of us desire by our own example and influence to aug- 



16 PROCEEDINGS. 

ment and transmit. What is the perfect church but a society of men and 
women asking for the best that God can give to them and to the com- 
munity, and giving over to their fellow-men out of a pure, strong life, 
in the name of the Master, those things which subsist in high principles 
and a noble self-devotion. On this festival, therefore, we do not dwell on 
the narrowness or bigotry of our forefathers, but on their magnanimity, 
their rugged sobriety, their fear of God, their devotion to justice and 
righteousness, and their union in Christian patience and love. In spite of 
all their native individualism, their civic virtues, grounded in their reli- 
gious temper and faith, wrought out a common life and a public spirit 
which have made New Ipswich, like the town in which I now reside, as 
described by Phillips Brooks, "everywhere and always, first, last, the 
sober, patriotic, straightforward New England town." It is not neces- 
sary for us to separate the factors which make up such a body politic ; it 
is enough for us to recognize the fundamental and all-pervasive influence 
of the Christian Church. 

Hymn, " Spare us, O Lord, aloud we cry." Complaint. 

Rev. Calvin Cutler of Auburndale, Mass., gave an address stating 
that the orator would help revive the memories of the sturdy men and 
matrons next Tuesday. Towns are but units that help make the state, 
neither the purse nor the sword is in their power. Town records should 
be sacredly guarded. The goodly heritage that we possess is due to the 
acts of our worthy ancestors. Its source is the Bible. 

Rev. Mr. Cutler mentioned the names of some of the prominent 
business men of the town who had pews while he preached here from 
1861 to '67: Rev. Samuel Lee, the fertility of his mind and the force of 
his character will long be remembered in all the region round about ; 
Prof. E. T. Quimby, the popular principal of Appleton Academy, John 
Preston, Esq., Frederick Jones, M. D., Deacons Reuben Taylor, John P. 
Clark, James Davis, William Hassell, also Stephen Thayer and Clark H. 
Obear, while the pews on either side of the pulpit were filled with the 
students of Appleton Academy. 

Mr. Cutler was the youngest candidate, and during the meeting for 
choosing a pastor an elderly brother arose and forcibly remarked, " I move 
we take the colt." 



PROCEEDINGS. 17 

The Children's Fair, still held annually, was started in the pastor's 
study, with the assistance of Prof. Quimby. William W. Johnson was 
the able auctioneer. 

Rev. Calvin Cutler's address, "Coming Home," is given in part. 

ADDRESS BY REV. CALVIN CUTLER. 

M\j Dear Friends : — Celebrations like this are fitted to extend the 
knowledge of the early history of the country. They are just tributes to 
the memory of worthy men to whom we are under everlasting obligations. 
They furnish fit occasions for inculcating the great principles which led to 
the settlement of the country, reminding us that there is something 
worthy to be commemorated in the soil we inhabit, and thus furnishing 
food for enlightened patriotism. * * * It is a time for personal 
reminiscences. 

Thirty-nine years ago the first Sunday in October I entered this pul- 
pit for the first time. The sun was bright, the air was crisp, the house 
was full, the music was fine, under the leadership of Mr. Peter H. Clark. 

The first funeral that occurred was that of a soldier ; a soldier was 
the first to be married and his bride not long after was a widow. 

We recall that Sunday when a company of volunteers marched up 
this aisle to worship before going into camp. Of these one was buried on 
the battlefield, and others were borne from this house to soldiers' graves. 

In the chapel every week the hands of ladies were busy preparing 
comforts for the sick and wounded soldiers. * * * The darkness 
was relieved by occasions of gladness, the joy of harvest, the mirth of 
weddings and social delights. Here I brought my newly wedded wife, 
and a delegation of citizens met us, and Academy students drew up in 
lines for us to drive through to our new home. 

Such memories crowd upon us all. They waylay us along the well- 
remembered roads. They greet us from the house where the vows of youth- 
ful love were spoken, or the silver cord was loosed and the spirit re- 
turned to God who gave it. Their voice comes up from Mill Village, 
Bank Village, and High Bridge. Gibson Village, Davis Village, and 
Wilder Village tell their story. They come down from Binney Hill. 
The stones are full of them. They spring up in the fields. The trees of 
the wood fling out their voice. They mingle with the murmurs of the 
Souhegan. * *• * We must turn to other thoughts. They are 
summed up, many of them, in a single word, that suggests more of earthly 



18 PROCEEDINGS. 

happiness than any other that can be named. It speaks of joy. It sings 
of love. Next to divine names it is the most sacred word we speak, and 
yet it is a common word. It is Home. The potency of a world-wide 
celebration lies in the call of the Governor upon the people of the state 
in every town to observe the festival of Home Week. 

It touches the heart of the absent sons and daughters, and they long 
to see again their old New Hampshire homes. Those who are on the old 
place leave the latch-string out to welcome those who return. Each is 
eager to see the other, to ask and to answer questions, to sit again at the 
home table, and sleep again under the rafters they used to gaze at in 
childhood, to see again the little red school-house. 

They recall the good times at the singing-school and the walk home, 
where the path was just wide enough for two — with care. 

Such are the thoughts of many hearts to-day. Words cannot pic- 
ture them, coin cannot buy them. They are the pledge of a healthy 
social life. 

And so we may congratulate ourselves that a theme so suited to the 
house of God is so fitting for this festival. * * * 

Much of the thinking of the present time goes to emphasize the 
thought of the individuality of men. It needs to be balanced by the 
thought of mutual organic relations. ^ 

And this festival at the foundation rests upon a truth which we are 
coming more and more to comprehend, — the unity of the race. The 
nation means that which is born. Its basis is identity of blood. It 
speaks of him who " hath made of one blood all nations of men for to 
dwell on all the face of the earth." * * * 

Great blessings flow from this spring of the home, — the control of 
children, the guidance of the young, the care of old age. * * * 

Could any other emblem stand more truthfully for all that is 
attractive in the heavenly world than the home of childhood? A living 
picture on which we may read the legend: "Of such is the kingdom 
of heaven." *' * *" 

Then think of the safeguard it offers against temptation. Full of 
evil is the spirit that would undermine the structure or loose the bonds 
of the family. For the family is the basis of the state. 

On the other hand the highest earthly joys have their seat in the 
home. We ought then to make more of our homes and try to make 
them better. It need not make us selfish, for the home is the emblem of 
communion — better than a thousand lessons on kindness. * * * 



PROCEEDINGS. 19 

The choicest blessings of home are open to all. 

"The sober comfort and all the peace that springs 
From the large aggregate of little things ; 
The small cares of daughter, wife, and friend. 
On which these social, sacred joys depend." 

There, wherever it be, in lordly mansion or in lowly cottage, — there 
is home, — the highest form of earthly blessing known to man, the truest 
relic of paradise lost, the truest emblem of paradise regained. 

" When believers pass that portal. 
Home, Sweet Home, is made immortal." 



After the address prayer was offered by Rev. Mr. Cutler. 

Anthem, "Strike the Cymbal." 

John Herbert, Esq., of Boston, the next speaker, was principal of 
Appleton Academy twenty-six years ago. 

Mr. Herbert gave an extemporaneous address on " Development of 
Religious Thought," and said in part : 

ADDRESS BY JOHN HERBERT, ESQ. 

Many changes in religious thought have occurred during the past 
one hundred and fifty years. * * *• There has been a great change 
in regard to the observance of the Sabbath. * * * The music of to- 
day would have been sacrilegious in those early days. '^' * * Instru- 
mental music was considered too worldly for the sanctuary, and every- 
thing worldly was believed to be the work of the devil. * * * Not 
only was everything artistic regarded as unholy and unfit for the church, 
but comfort within its walls was deemed to be improper; and therefore no 
stove or other means of heating was provided, but each person was 
obliged to carry his or her foot stove. * * * Everybody was ex- 
pected to go to church, but all walking, except to or from church, was 
considered wicked. * * * Boys were sometimes allowed to walk 
through the cemetery. 

A great change has taken place in the view entertained concerning 
Christian life. * * * In earlier years all natural desires were 
thought to be of the devil. *' ^'- * Our temporal life was supposed 
to be necessarily full of trials, burdens and unhappiness, and therefore a 
life not to be desired, except for the happiness in the hereafter. This led 



20 PROCEEDINGS. 

many good people to sympathize with the little boy who prayed that he 
might be good — not very good, but just good enough not to get a whip- 
ping. Now we have a different view of Christian life. We believe that 
God created us to be happy both here and hereafter, and that the here- 
after is but the here extended into the after. As every drop of the great 
ocean has in it all the elements of the ocean, and every ray of light has 
in it all the elements of the sun, so every moment of time has in it all 
the elements of eternity. 

Josh Billings once said, "Truth is said to be stranger than fiction — 
it is to most folks." * * * in the past many had more faith in their 
creed than in truth itself. We are coming to have more faith in truth 
and to believe that 

"Truth is the image of our God above, 
That shines reflected in His sea of Love." 

The hieroglyphic representation of Truth on the tombs of ancient 
Egypt is an image holding in its hand the symbol of life, and bearing 
upon its head an ostrich feather, the symbol of immortality. So truth, 
accepted and followed, will enable us to forge the key which unlocks the 
door to the kingdom of happiness here and hereafter. 

Let us hope that when the people of New Ipswich celebrate the 200th 
anniversary of the settlement of the town they may all heartily sing : 

" All hail ! blest Truth, thou daughter of the skies, 
Reign thou on earth and bid earth's sons arise ; 
Bid virtue lead and justice hold the scale, 
For thou art mighty and wilt soon prevail. 
Seize then on truth where'er 'tis found, 
Among your friends, among your foes, 
On Christian or on worldly ground 
The plant's divine where'er it grows." 

Hymn, "How long, dear Saviour, O, how long?" Northfield. 

Hymn, " Lord, what a thoughtless wretch was L" Greenwich. 

Rev. Frederick W. Greene of Middletown, Conn., closed with an 
address on "The Increasingly Intensifying Power of a Godly Ancestry," 
and said in part : 

ADDRESS OF REV. FREDERICK W. GREENE. 

True to her sign hung out upon Mt. Jackson, New Hampshire pro- 
duces men. But the good seed of this harvest was a godly ancestry. It 



PROCEEDINGS. 21 

is a personal touch with a living God that binds the generations together. 
The rest of our environment changes. He alone remains the same. The 
first definition of God in Exodus (xxxiv. 6 and 7), recognizes the spiritual 
influence of the past upon the present. 

The Jewish race furnishes the most glorious examples of the truth 
of the subject, for it produced or made possible, the Christ. He was the 
flower of their national spiritual life. But they rejected him. 

Veneration for the past may have a good or a bad effect upon our 
lives. If it leads us to look for God only in the past it is deadening ; if 
it leads us to know a living God we become " living stones, built upon the 
foundations of the apostles and prophets," etc. 

My oldest boy is named after Rev. Mr. Ainsworth, for seventy-five 
years the pastor of the church in Jaff"rey, and my second boy after Judge 
Farrar of New Ipswich ; but if in their manhood they do not know the 
God of their forefathers there will be no reason for pride in their ancestry. 

Finally, if our thoughts are toward the good men of the past, just 
as truly theirs are toward us to-day, rejoicing with us, working with us. 
The " wise man" said, "Thine own friend and thy father's friend forsake 
not." Let us apply it to our own personal relations to Jesus Christ, our 
father's friend, " The same yesterday, to-day, yea and forever." 

Hymn, " Gone are those great and good." Pierpont. 
The benediction was pronounced by Rev. Dr. Bancroft. 



MONDAY, AUGUST 27. 



This day was chiefly devoted to making calls and interchanging 
reminiscences. Public buildings and many private houses were decorated. 
In the evening an open air concert was given at the bandstand on Acad- 
emy campus by Battery B Band of Worcester, Mass. 

" Absence makes the heart grow fonder." 

The following named persons registered : 

Henry R. Reed, Boston, Mass. 
Charles H. Allen, Boston, Mass. 
Rev. Cecil F. P. Bancroft, Andover, Mass. 
John Herbert, Esq., Boston, Mass. 
Hon. R. H. Stearns, Boston, Mass. 
Judge Chauncy Perry, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Timothy Perry, Esq., Brooklyn, N. Y. 
Prof. Charles H. Chandler, Ripon College, Ripon, Wis. 
John W. Cummings, New York, N. Y. 
George Hardwick, Annandale, Minn. 
Henry Hersey, Hingham, Mass. 
Mary H. Hersey, Hingham, Mass. 
Benjamin Champney, North Conway, N. H. 

Major Thomas Franklin Davis (a veteran of the Mexican war), 
Nashua, N. H. 

Rev. W. D. Waldron, Boston, Mass. 

George D. Burton, Boston, Mass. 

Frances J. Burton, Boston, Mass. 

H. O. Shepley, Canton, 111. 

Anne C. Gibson Shepley, Canton, 111. 

Charles E. Houghton, Baltimore, Md. 

Mrs. Charles E. Houghton, Baltimore, Md. 



PROCEEDINGS. 23 



S. A.. Thayer, New Ipswich, N. H. 

Carrie Lovett Gannett, Wollaston, Mass. 

S. Josephine Lovett Lane, Ashmont, Mass. 

Emma Gushing Blanchard, Lynn, Mass. 

Frances A. Gushing, Jersey Gity, N. J. 

Rev. Galvin Cutler, Auburndale, Mass. 

Mrs. Martha E. Cutler, Auburndale, Mass. 

Sanford L. Cutler, New York, N. Y. 

Charles S. Davis, Newton Center, Mass. 

Albert L. Perry, Brooklyn, N. Y. 

Mary Y. Hiccock Draper, Wakefield, Mass. 

Edward M. Fox, Boston, Mass. 

Sarah E. Batchelder, New York, N. Y. 

L. Perrin, Brookline, Mass. 

Alfred A. Stevens, Portland, Me. 

Mrs. Lucy Reed Sawyer, Arlington, Mass. 

Lizzie Clark Crowell, Boston, Mass. 

Henry A. Spear, Everett, Mass. 

Henry B. Batchelder, New York, N. Y. 

Richard A. Hale, Lawrence, Mass. 

Edward S. Kraus, Paris, France. 

Anna F. Walter, Middletown, Gt. 

Eliza F. Clary, New Britain, Gt. 

Richard Hall Stearns, Boston, Mass. 

Mrs. R. H. Stearns, Boston, Mass. 

William M. Walker, Sterling, Col. 

George H. Taylor, Lowell, Mass. 

Harry H. Chandler, Waltham, Mass. 

George F. Conant, Worcester, Mass. 

Mrs. George F. Conant, Worcester, Mass. 

George A. Sanders, Worcester, Mass. 

Mary Edson Barnard, Cambridge, Mass. 

Charles H. Fox, Roxbury, Mass. 

Mrs. Lebanon Brqwn, Allston, Mass. 

Robert R. Ames, Cambridge, Mass. 

William Willis Clark, Boston, Mass. 

Mrs. Frances Wheeler Russell, Oakland, Ore. 

Matilda Hodgman Keyou, East Lexington, Mass. 

C. E. Keyou, Hinsdale, N. H. 



24 PROCEEDINGS. 

George H. Wheeler, Boston, Mass. 

James H. Farwell, Zumbrota, Minn. 

Fred Smith, Boston, Mass. 

Willis F. Smith, Boston, Mass. 

Nahum A. Child, Temple, N. H. 

Earl H. Farwell, Fitchburg, Mass. 

Charles F. Hastings, Somerville, Mass. 

A. P. Bateman, Winchendon, Mass. 

Arthur C. Farley, Auburndale, Mass. 

Frank Weston, Townsend, Mass. 

A. M. Hannaford, Claremont, N. H. 

Mrs. George H. Taylor, Lowell, Mass. 

Mrs. Jennie L. Field, Northfield Farms, Mass. 

Ernest C. Field, Northfield Farms, Mass. 

Mrs. Mary L. Horton, Fitchburg, Mass. 

Mrs. G. K. Rand, Worcester, Mass. 

G. K. Rand, Worcester, Mass. 

Mrs. F. J. Ames (Wheeler), Peterboro, N. H. 

Frances O. Davis, Newton Center, Mass. 

Samuel P. Gates, Bridgewater, Mass. 

Dorcas B. Hayward, Ashby, Mass. 

Augusta H. Wright, Ashby, Mass. 

Carrie A. Wright, Ashby, Mass. 

Caroline E. Moore, New York, N. Y. 

Permelia Thayer Farley, West Newton, Mass. 

Diana P. Boyce Conant, Peterboro, N. H. 

M. E. McDonnell, Leominster, Mass. 

S. K. McDonnell, Leominster, Mass. 

K. E. Davis Piper, Ashby, Mass. 

Marshall W. Chandler, Winchendon, Mass. 

Nancy Chandler, New Ipswich, N. H. 

Abbie L. Hayward, Ashby, Mass. 

Alfred H. Brown, Canterbury, N. H. 

Mrs. Alfred H. Brown, Canterbury, N. H. . 

Mrs. H. O. Hildreth, Auburn, Me. 

H. O. Hildreth, Auburn, Me. 

W. Hildreth, Newton, Mass. 

A. Reed Tenney, New Ipswich, N. H. 

Mrs. E. Fox, Boston, Mass. 



PROCEEDINGS. 

Mrs. Charles Blodgett, Dorchester, Mass. 
Miss V. M. Weldon, Roxbury, Mass. 
Lizzie Hill Aspinwall, Townsend, Mass. 
W. Simonds Hill, Townsend, Mass. 
George J. Maxwell, Rindge, N. H. 
Ella Mabel Hill, Townsend, Mass. 
George H. Brooks, Ashby, Mass. 
Mrs. CM. Brooks. Ashby, Mass. 
Mrs. A. A. Hill, Townsend, Mass. 
Ada Nutting, Townsend, Mass. 
Mark O. Smith, Milford, N. H. 
Waldo Clement, Milford, N. H. 
Miss Sophia E. Lawrence, Ashby, Mass. 
Mrs. Marion A. Lawrence, Ashby, Mass. 
Henry A. Lawrence, Ashby, Mass. 
Penelope Hamilton, Providence, R. 1. 
Oliver D. Wilder, Lowell, Mass. 
James O. Reed, Mason, N. H. 
Mrs. Caroline R. Reed, Mason, N. H. 
James O. Reed, Jr., Mason, N. H. 

Mrs. Harriet Reed Strout, Waltham, Mass. 

Miss Letty A. Strout, Waltham, Mass. 

Margaret L. Willard, Ashby, Mass. 

Bessie J. Willard, Ashby, Mass. 

Sarah M. Willard, Ashby, Mass. 

F. A. Willard, Ashby, Mass. 

Mrs. F. A. Willard, Ashby, Mass. 

Mabel L. Hodgman, Brookline, N. H. 

E. E. Livingstone, Fitchburg, Mass. 

Mrs. E. E. Livingstone, Fitchburg, Mass. 

Mrs. Jennie Blanchard Ranquer, Neponset, Mass. 

Mrs. Harriet N. Bliss Goldsmith, New Ipswich, N. H. 

Miss Annie A. Goldsmith, New Ipswich, N. H. 

William H. Doonan, Greenville, N. H. 

Mrs. Ellen Preston Robinson, East Boston, Mass. 

Mrs. Sarah J. Heyward, Temple, N. H. 

M. L. Sargent, Milford, N. H. 

Mrs. M. L. Sargent, Milford, N. H. 

Etta L. Sargent, Milford, N. H. 



25 



26 PROCEEDINGS. 

John S. Chandler, Canton, III. 

M. H. Fish, Temple, N. H. 

Mrs. M. H. Fish, Temple, N. H. 

Mrs. Belle Brown Cummings, Orange, Mass. 

William H. Brown, Shirley, Mass. 

J. F. Brown, Shirley, Mass. 

D. M. Waldron, Boston, Mass. 

Mrs. Lizzie Locke Collins, Albuquerque, N. M. 

Rodney Wallace, Fitchburg, Mass. 

Lebanon Brown, M. D., Boston, Mass. 

Frank W. Rollins, Concord, N. H. 

A. D. Ayling, Concord, N. H. 

Mary E. Brown Burroughs, Boxborough, Mass. 

Lottie Willard Thompson, Fitzwilliam, N. H. 

Henry W. Nutting, Worcester, Mass. 

Caroline F. Jones, New Ipswich, N. H. 

Mrs. Clark H. Obear, New Ipswich, N. H. 

Miss Helen S. PoUey, Boston, Mass. 

Edward T. Jewett, Waltham, Mass. 

Oliver D. Wilder, Lowell, Mass. 

Mrs. Jennie Bateman Puffer, West Somerville, Mass. 

Robert J. W. Phinney, Woburn, Mass. 

Sarah M. C. Phinney, Woburn, Mass. 

Henry T. Champney, Nevv York, N. Y. 

Stillman Gibson, Townsend, Mass. 

George W. Shattuck, Ayer, Mass, 

Sarah G. Shattuck, Ayer, Mass. 

P. H. Devans, East Jaffrey, N. H. 



TUESDAY, AUGUST 28. 



The town was crowded with visitors and every one was most cor- 
dially welcomed to join in the festivities attending the one hundred and 
fiftieth anniversary, which assembled so many sons and daughters of 
talent, noble character and patriotic devotion. The day was ushered in 
with the booming of cannon. The fluttering of banners, the lavish dis- 
play of bunting, the prominence of " Old Glory," the open doors, and 
the universal good cheer all testified that New Ipswich was about to spend 
a gala day. The weather was ideal, and very early visitors from the 
adjoining towns began to arrive. 

The various organizations assembled in front of Clark's Hotel at nine 
o'clock. The column was formed under the direction of the chief mar- 
shal, Lauriston M. P. Hardy, and his aids, Albert F. Walker and Wilbur 
L. Phelps, in the following order: 

Drum Major, Thomas E. Kielty. 

Battery B Band of Worcester, Mass., twenty-one members. 

Capt. Jonas Nutting Post, No. 53, G. A. R. 

President of the Day, John L. Hildreth, M. D. 

Invited guests. 

Chaplains, Rev. Cecil F. P. Bancroft and Rev. William R. Thompson. 

Anniversary Committee in carriages. 

Peterboro Cavalry, Capt. Charles Davis. 

Lyndeboro Artillery, Capt. Edward Ross. 

Tiger Engine Co., Foreman Charles L. Knowlton. 

Southern Hero Engine Co., Foreman Edward R. Wheeler. 

Citizens with carriages and bicycles. 



28 PROCEEDINGS. 

The line of the procession was past the Baptist church and Appleton 
Academy over Preston hill to Bank Village, where Gov. Frank W. Rol- 
lins and staff, consisting of the following gentlentien. Gen. A. D. Ayling, 
Gen. W. E. Spalding, Gen. H. H. Dudley, Col. E. vS. Head, Col. J. M. 
Sargent, Col. Sam Lewis and Col. Joseph H. Coit, were met. The 
governor and party came in a private car to Greenville, N. H., on the 
morning train, where the delegation was received by a committee of three, 
— John Preston, Frederic W. Jones and Edward O. Marshall, — repre- 
senting the anniversary committee. The governor and staff were assigned 
a place next to the Capt. Jonas Nutting Post, G. A. R. While His 
Excellency was en route from Greenville the usual salute of seventeen 
guns was fired from the hill in the rear of the residence of George L. 
Muzzey by the gunners' squad of the Lyndeboro Artillery. 

The return march from Bank Village was made over Walton hill 
down Main street to PostofRce square, thence to the Congregational 
church, where the literary exercises were held. Many private residences 
and public buildings along the route of the procession were beautifully 
decorated with flags and bunting. Gov. Rollins, the founder of " Old 
Home Week," greatly honored this old historic town, coming as a guest 
crowned with the well-earned laurels of his felicitous oratory, uttered in 
so many sections during the festivities of "Old Home Week" in the 
Granite State. 

The column halted in front of the church and their reserved seats in 
the central aisle were soon filled with eager listeners. The other parts of 
the church had been open to the public and previously occupied. 

The President of the Day, J. L. Hildreth, M. D., of Cambridge, 
Mass., called the meeting to order and prayer was offered by Rev. Cecil 
F. P. Bancroft, after which the President gave his address. 

ADDRESS OF WELCOME BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE DAY, 
DR. JOHN I.. HILDRETH. 

It is my pleasant duty, in behalf of this old town which we love, 
to bid you welcome to this celebration of her one hundred and fiftieth 
birthday. To many of you, the town is a present home: to some, the 



PROCEEDINGS. 29 

only home you have known. To others, it is the old home, to which, 
after wanderings afar, you come back to join in these festivities, just as 
children, grown up and widely scattered, come back on some Thanks- 
giving day to the old roof-tree, talk over the old days and revive the 
old affections. 

But, coming from near or far, what is the tie which, pulling at our 
heart strings, compels us to leave our ordinary pleasures and pursuits, and 
come back here to-day ? It is not in many instances at least, the tie of a 
personal affection for those now living : for the familiar faces are gone. 
Time has done its work, and the joy of return is tinged with melancholy. 
But with us all, it is the love for the town itself, for all that it means in 
our memory, for all that it actually stands for to-day. 

It is the fashion in some quarters nowadays, to belittle the sentiment 
of patriotism. When men take their lives in their hands and go out to 
battle for liberty in Cuba, or for the authority of the United States in the 
Philippines, or to rescue from deadly peril missionaries and legations in 
China, there are those who impute to them, or to the government which 
they serve, some sordid or sinister motive. But, whatever may be thought 
of particular measures of national policy, the spirit of patriotism burns 
as brightly now as ever, and the motive which leads men to respond to 
the calls which the country makes upon them is the same which prompted 
men in the Revolution or the Civil war. 

Looked at broadly, we call this sentiment patriotism: but the senti- 
ment of local pride, of local attachment, is of the same quality and may 
well be given the same name. We love our country after we have first 
learned to love our home, and because we have learned to love it. It is 
the home feeling in the larger sense, — enclosed at first within four walls, 
then extending to all that comes within the narrow horizon of the child 
and growing youth, and later including larger and more varied interests — 
this it is which brings us here on this occasion. 

And when we speak of "the town," what do we mean? What 
constitutes the town? Not farm joining farm, whether of fertile fields, 
or of thin reluctant soil : not roads or hills or any physical features : not 
even the people who, at any given time, live within its borders : it is the 
sum total of these, and of much more than these. It is the institutions 
of education and religion; it is the free popular government, in which 
each man is the equal of every other man ; it is the ideals of character, 
sustained by public sentiment and exemplified in noble and useful lives; 
it is unselfishness in the home, kindness between neighbors, the ready 



30 PROCEEDINGS. 

sympathy in time of trouble, the caring for the sick, the watching by the 
dead, the thousand gentle and friendly ways in which joys and sorrows 
are shared; all this goes to the making of a town, and enters into our 
thought of this town to-day. 

It is a mistake to estimate the importance of a town by statistics of 
its industries, by the computation of its wealth, or by the size of its popu- 
lation. The best product of this town is not its crops, but its men and 
women; not only those who have stayed by the old homes, making them 
what we see them to-day, but equally those who have gone forth from 
them. You who were born or educated here, who have gone out from 
here to find success in business or art or literature or any profession or 
occupation, — you too are a part of the assets of New Ipswich. To have 
given birth to you, to have trained you for your work, to have furnished 
you with the standards and incentives which have stimulated you in your 
careers, is a part of the distinction which this town claims. It is just such 
towns as this, a little aside from the ordinary currents of trade and industry, 
which have kept alive and vigorous the distinctively New England traits 
of character, and have supplied some of the best blood for the renewal and 
replenishment of the national life. 

Fifty years ago, as a boy, I witnessed the celebration of the one 
hundredth anniversary of the charter of this town. I remember the pro- 
cession of visitors from Boston and elsewhere, which, as it crossed the 
town line, was met by the committee of reception, while a welcoming 
salute was fired from a field-piece on one of the adjoining hills. I 
watched the procession which moved the next morning from Union hall to 
the field in the rear of the residence of Mr. Newton Brooks, where a 
stand had been erected and a great assemblage had convened under the 
open sky, to hear the oration by Dr. Augustus A. Gould and the poem by 
Mr. Eugene Bachelder. The impression on my mind was vivid ; yet, as 
a boy, I could not fully appreciate all that the occasion meant. 

Of those present here to-day, probably there are some among the 
younger who, fifty years from now, will have some part in the town's 
two hundredth anniversary. What material changes they may have wit- 
nessed in the interval, what developments in the arts and sciences, what 
improvements in the conditions of life, what new facilities for commerce, 
industry and transportation, it would be idle to conjecture: just as, fifty 
years ago, it would have been impossible to predict the telephone, the 
electric car and the automobile. But of one thing we may cherish a 
reasonable assurance : that they will find here the same high standards of 



PROCEEDINGS. 



31 



character, the same fidelity to duty, the same sincerity of religious faith 
which were manifest half a century ago, and are vital here to-day. 

ORATION BY rUOF. CHARLKS H. CHANDLER, RIPON, WISCONSIN. 

" Near us bends the leafy wiklwooil, 

Pecked with flowers that bloomed of yore, 
While tlic pillared hills of chiUlhood 
Hound the world for us once more." 

FeUow-townsnien and Friends: — These lines, written by a daughter 
of our good town and sung at the meeting a half century ago, have oft 
come to my mind during the last few days, as they have also frequently 
recurred when in past years I have occasionally come within the encircling 
shadows of our old home, and have recognized the welcome of the horizon 
of broken contour, changed here and there, but still preserving the famil- 
iar aspect of our younger da3's. 

Among the clearest recollections of my early boyhood are those of the 
centennial assembly in the neighboring natural amphitheatre. I remember 
the days of anticipation, and most distinctly do 1 recall the awe impressed 
upon my being by the aspect of the chief marshal. Col. Prichard, whose 
spirited steed and flowing sash so completely eclipsed the otherwise not- 
able splendor of his aids. To my boyish vision the display of that day 
far outclassed the splendors of the annual muster of the Twenty-second 
Regiment, which had been held in this town the preceding year and given 
a joyous excitement in the midst of the monotony of boy life on the farm. 
But the centennial meeting, presented but once to the eyes of any one of 
us, I recall as having a certain aspect, undefined and unexplained, but by no 
means unnoticed by my boyish mind, which remained unchanged in 
memory until the school of life has revealed its interpretation and has 
given the first place in the retrospective thoughts of September 11, 1850, 
to the radiant light in the faces of friends of years long sped, and the 
evident meetings of heart with heart as long parted hands came once 
more into earnest clasp. 

And though we may not bring a second centennial of this town 
within our experience, yet to-day again our mother amid the Granite Hills 
welcomes us no less heartily, and, — in the words of our poet of fifty 
years ago, — 

Her "joyful welcomes bid the heart to feel 
That kindness here is not oflicious zeal, 
Hut something; more — a greeting kind and warm, 
That gladdens life and takes the heart by storm." 



32 PROCEEDINGS. 

Yes, her hills welcome us and we heartily respond to their greeting. 
Some of us are lo3'al sons and daughters of foster-mothers, hundreds, per- 
haps thousands, of miles away ; we are proud of the states which we call 
our own. Perhaps we joy in broad prairies, with noble expanse of gran- 
deur hardly surpassed by that of the boundless ocean ; we may have ex- 
perienced many a feeling of relief, as we have recalled the weary ascents 
and precipitous descents of boyhood ; and not improbably some of us, 
revelling in the wealth of virgin soil free from obstructions to the plow 
and the reaper, may have been glad that only in memory we wrestled 
with the cliifs and boulders of the paternal farms. 

But, if we have been lovg absent, I feel sure that revulsions of feel- 
ing have ensued, and even though our homes have not been in those 
western regions of which Bret Harte has said that the shadow of the sta- 
tion was the only thing that moved, but in broad realms of unsurpassed 
fertility, and amid the beauties of the gentle undulations and rolling hills 
so abundant in our western states, still the home instincts have asserted 
their power, and as the train has borne us homeward, and the granite ribs 
of our eastern mother have begun to appear through the scanty garb of 
foliage, our hearts have bounded joyously, and we have longed to leap 
from the train and press our lips to the clear fountains born amid the 
crystal rocks. 

And although the bonds of kindred blood and of early association 
doubtless rightly hold the greater place amid the pleasures of our home 
return, still the heart response does not comprise the whole. By our ex- 
perience in other homes our intellectual appreciation has been awakened 
to a recognition of truths long unseen. 

It has been said that New England tourists are the despair of pro- 
fessional guides on the Alps, along the Rhine, and amid other foreign 
scenery of world-wide repute. From him whose earliest vision rested 
upon the scenery of the White or the Green Mountains, or the little lakes 
scattered amid the isolated peaks like Monadnock and Watatic, or even 
the humbler heights of Kidder and "Whittemore, the tribute of admiration 
is not easily won. Familiarity has bred, not the proverbial contempt, 
but rather an unconscious indifference, obscuring the aesthetic vision, until 
the effect of the long surfeit of early life amid Nature's ever-present 
beauties is healed by the abstinence of absence. 

I hardly think that my experience of a few years ago was peculiar, 
when traversing a path familiar to my youthful footsteps along the road 
now hardly to be traced in places across the Massachusetts line and over 



PROCEEDINGS. 33 

Nutting hill in Ashburnham to the classic region of the " Children in 
the Woods" tavern, I turned aside near the southwest corner of this town 
to ascend Emerson hill ; and although nearer peaks hid the stately Monad- 
nock fronn my vision, yet as I looked from the summit of the hill over 
the strikingly varied landscape of farm and village, hill, valley and stream, 
beginning in the northeast with the striking forms of the Unconoonucks, 
and stretching southeastwardly nearly to the ocean before being lost to 
sight, while the wide extent of Worcester county to the southwest gave a 
fullness of beautiful detail sufficient for hours of observation, my former 
blindness came vividly into recognition, and I wondered if yet, as in my 
boyhood, the vision passes unnoticed by those who are near. 

Neither is it in the recognition of Nature's beauties alone that the 
absent children have learned new lessons in their new homes. Hardly 
less is it true that they have learned more of the value of the familiar 
lessons in thrift, in firmness of principle, in respect for that blessing of 
protean form included in the word order, in the almost reverence for edu- 
cation, which have been a steadying power to every community in whose 
formation New England's children have had a part. 

But I must remember that I was called to this place for other pur- 
poses than are set forth in the expression of the thoughts that spontane- 
ously arise at a home-coming; rather for a review of such historical con- 
siderations as form an appropriate topic for the hour. I turn to this duty ; 
but, as I approach the consideration of the fifty years which have passed 
since Dr. Gould presented to us the record of the heroic days of our town, 
I have to recognize that fifty years, despite mathematical truth, are by 
no means half of a century, when called upon to furnish material for an 
historical address. A large part of those to whom [ speak know the 
history of this more recent period far better than myself, and delving amid 
records can bring forth little of general interest in review. Not only does 
the first half of the nineteenth century contain much more of that which 
is beyond our personal memories, but it greatly gains in interest from the 
unfamiliar atmosphere of the earlier days. 

I trust, therefore, that I may reasonably ask those of my hearers 
who recall those chronicles of early days presented to the sons of New 
Ipswich assembled fifty years ago, and afterward amplified and published 
in one of the earliest of the volumes containing the histories of New England 
towns, that they will charitably consider any lack of dramatic interest in 
what I shall say, when it is compared with the result of the faithful labor 
of Dr. Gould. The pioneer period, whose most prosaic events have much 
3 



34 PROCEEDINGS. 

of the charm of romance to our later vision, and also the local details of 
a national birth, were among the topics of our centennial, in comparison 
with which the home industries of the last half of the century fail to 
present interest in narration, while the work of New Ipswich in the in- 
tense period of the fifty years now drawing to an end, the history-making 
period of 1861 to 1865, has been recently so well presented by its local 
historian that nothing more than casual reference to its relations to other 
facts is needed to-day. I will, however, call attention to one thought 
based upon the facts collected by Mrs. Obear for her book on " New 
Ipswich in the Civil War." From the seventeen hundred inhabitants of 
our town were furnished to the armies of the Union a total of ninety-five 
soldiers, (hired substitutes from abroad not being included), nineteen of 
whose names upon the memorial stone erected by their fellow townsmen 
testify to the greatness of their gift. Of these men, amounting to about 
one company, four held captain's commissions, and six were lieutenants, 
there being also fourteen non-commissioned officers among them ; a record 
indicating worthy descent from ancestors of the days of the Revolution. 

I further fear that under the restrictions and limitations which I 
have suggested as existent the flavor of the remaining material for the 
hour will prove so much enfeebled that we shall be under the necessity 
of over-stepping the chronological boundaries of the special field of this 
day and ranging in freedom over the entire past century and a half, per- 
haps also longing for the prophet's vision of the century to come. 

Moreover, if we limit our vision too closely, the element of pathos in 
our home-coming tends too strongly toward sadness. More or less uncon- 
sciously, it is true, but yet really, we have turned toward our early home 
expecting to renew the experiences of youth ; the remembered landscape, 
changed it is true, but still familiar, seems to give promise to our silent 
expectation ; and it is with a rude shock, perhaps, that we meet an ex- 
perience like that of a former student of our academy who, having come a 
few years since with joyous anticipations to a meeting of the alumni, 
complained on her return to her home of the strange fact that " all the 
girls were old women." More than this must be true for those of us who 
have been long away. Not merely have blooming cheeks withered and 
the sturdy grasp of the hand grown feeble, but it may be that the charm 
of the eloquent landscape grows feeble to us, as did the voice of the break- 
ing sea to Tennyson, because of the longing 

" For the touch of a vanished hand. 
And the sound of a voice that is still." 



PROCEEDINGS. 35 

Perhaps we find that the neighboring field of the dead, extending 
now its bounds far beyond those which we remember, presents to our 
longing gaze names which tend to make it the most home-like place of 
the town. We remember, among those whom the special period of this 
day's thought has borne to that home, the pastor of twenty-five years' 
earnest service. Rev. Samuel Lee; Dr. Stillman Gibson, whose patients 
during many years came from such distances as demanded a place for his 
name upon neighboring guide-boards; his son-in-law, the man of broad 
culture. Dr. Frederic .Jones, whose visits brought relief to many homes 
during almost half a century; the attorney of nearly forty years' success- 
ful practice, Hon. John Preston, whose conclusive arguments flavored 
with characteristic humor are so well remembered by many citizens as 
fatal to schemes presented in town-meeting for the depletion of the treas- 
ury: the brothers, .John and Peter H. Clark, whose mandates all the 
melody of the town obeyed; men prominent in official and business 
activities of the town each for from twenty to fifty years, like George 
Barrett, James Chandler, Jeremiah Smith, William W. Johnson, Stephen 
Thayer, and many others of whom time forbids mention. 

Still further, through the years we may have remembered the 

familiar customs and occupations of our town in the middle of the century 

so clearly that they seem to be a part of New Ipswich itself; yet probably 

we fail to find them on our return, and the home we sought seems to have 

departed. If these things sadden us, we need to remember that the truth 

of the Quaker Poet is very broad when he sings 

" That Life is ever lord of Death, 
And Love can never lose its own." 

The New Ipswich we cherish is not thus confined ; it is not limited 
by the years of the present, nor by the encircling hills. We who are 
scattered in distant homes declare by our return that we are still of New 
Ipswich, and that her past and her future are ours. 

A marked trait of New Ipswich character has been a quick vision 
of coming needs. Her children have been among the first along many 
lines. Perhaps, therefore, it is somewhat a matter for surprise that the 
centennial should not have been observed until the expiration of a decade 
or more in excess of a century from the first settlement in town. The 
organization under the Masonian grant indeed dates from 1750, but 
among the petitioners for the grant a year before that date are found the 
names of thirteen persons said to be "of a place called New Ipswich," of 
whom at least one seems to have been a resident of that place for thirteen 



36 PROCEEDINGS. 

years. Had 1738 been called the birth-date of our town instead of 1750, 
it would have been more noticeable that in settlement, as in many later 
activities, New Ipswich was in the front rank. Few were the white men 
in regions as far from the tracts made accessible by the seaboard and the 
larger rivers, when Abijah Foster built his log-house near the site of the 
present Bank building as a shelter for his wife and daughter. 

Without reviewing the history of the town already made familiar to 
most of her loyal children by the pages of the History, itself almost a 
pioneer among local histories, we may call to mind the erection of the 
first cotton factory of New Hampshire within our limits now almost a 
hundred years ago, and also the enterprise of our ancestors in founding 
the academy, an institution whose contribution to the town's prosperity 
can hardly be over-estimated, at a date second to that of only one similar 
institution in the state, Phillips Exeter academy, which antedates our 
own by only five years, although the town of Exeter, near New Hamp- 
shire's only seaport, was one hundred years the senior of New Ipswich. 

But these thoughts cannot turn us from the consideration of one of 
the most familiar of epigrammatic sayings, — that this is not the same 
world as that of fifty years ago. Especially is it true that this country is 
not the country of fifty years since. That period of time has witnessed 
its passage from youth to mature age. We may believe, indeed, that the 
rapid pulsations of the national heart and the strenuous loyal endeavors of 
the years immediately succeeding the shots fired at Sumter marked the 
attainment of our nation's majority. Of course, then, it must be a truth 
that our town, ever the same to her loyal children, yet has found such 
widely diff"erent conditions, has passed through such before unknown 
experiences in these last fifty years, as have greatly changed its aspect. 
A recognition of these changes is surely in order. 

Since Hon. John Preston with well remembered geniality presided at 
the centennial festivities of our town, a generation and a half of her citi- 
zens have passed off" the stage of life and have in a few cases been suc- 
ceeded by children and grandchildren whose faces and voices seem almost 
to place again before us those who bore the same names in the days of 
our childhood. But the change is practically complete. Not one of the 
twenty-five town officers named in the town report covering that year re- 
mains ; and of only four of them, if I am not in error, are there descend- 
ants bearing their names now resident in town. Of the entire ninety 
names appearing in that report I recognize only two, those of John C. 
Hildreth and Charles Taylor, still borne by citizens yet holding honorable 



PROCEEDINGS. 87 

places among us in recognition of faithful lives well occupied during the 
intervening half century. I cannot say that there may not be others still 
living elsewhere, but I have learned of none. Of the more than fifty 
citizens, some at that time non-resident, comprising the various committees 
in charge of the e.xercises of that historic day, I find but three remaining, 
Charles M. Wheeler, now, I believe, of La Ku^uf, Pa., Isaac C. Stearns 
of Zumbrota, Minn., and one, somewhat the oldest of the three, and pre- 
sumably our town patriarch, although now resident beyond its bounds, 
Roby Fletcher of Fitchburg, who maintained on the list of the citizens of 
New Ipswich a name extending nearly to the conventional founding of 
the town, the son of a revolutionary patriot who was the author of one 
of the three earliest literary works having birth in this town, and also a 
descendant of the first settler within our bounds, Abijah Foster. 

This reference to ancestral lines suggests the question to what ex- 
tent the early families, giving character to New Ipswich, are still repre- 
sented among her citizens. As we recall the numerous neighborhood 
marriages incident to the life of early days, it becomes evident that an 
investigation based upon surnames alone will yield but partial results. 
The blood of the Barretts, the Bullards, the Champneys, the Farrars, the 
Kidders, and the Prestons flows in the veins of one New Ipswich citizen 
of to-day; and similar, if somewhat less diversified, pioneer ancestry 
might, without doubt, be found in many cases by a sufficiently extended 
examination of family records. This is of course impracticable, but an 
examination restricted to descendants with surnames unchanged may not 
be devoid of interest. 

Antecedent to this, however, it seems well to recall a few leading 
facts and dates of early history which may not be entirely familiar to all, 
but which locate more definitely the relative positions of the difiierent 
names in the annals of our town. The history of the claims under which 
the settlers in the southern portion of New Hampshire took possession of 
the wilderness and established their homes is far from easy to adjust and 
retain in memory, as I doubt not that many readers of the chapter of our 
town history presenting with great care the History of the Land Title 
have found. Sanborn's History of New Hampshire, Fiske's Beginnings 
of New England and other publications more recent than our own local 
history are prone to produce in our minds a "confusion worse confounded," 
finally leaving little beyond a very clear conviction that the English 
rulers of early days were very ignorant of geography, and not at all care- 



38 PROCEEDINGS. 

ful to be sure of their own titles to land which they saw fit to grant to 
those whom they would favor. 

Both time and patience would fail should we review the various con- 
flicting elements of the early claims ; a considerable portion of the east- 
ern part of this state seems to have belonged to three conflicting grants ; 
but a brief presentation of two of these will sufficiently indicate the 
legal difficulties in the settlement of our town. 

In 1606 King James I. incorporated two companies, known as the 
London and the Plymouth companies, dividing between them the 
American coast for a distance diff'erently stated by diff"erent authorities as 
fifty, sixty, and one hundred miles inland, but extending from the thirty- 
fourth to the forty-fifth degree of latitude, that is from Cape Fear to the 
eastern extremity of the Maine coast, the Plymouth company having the 
northern half. Sir Ferdinando Gorges and John Mason were prominent 
members of the Council of Plymouth, and in the division of the grant 
they sought and obtained large portions. But not content with the nar- 
row strip along the coast, by personal grants from the king they extended 
their claims far into the interior. One of these grants to Gorges and his 
associates, made in 1620, gave title to the land lying between the fortieth 
and forty-eighth parallels of latitude, that is from New Jersey to the mouth 
of the St. Lawrence, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Mason 
secured a grant from the Plymouth Council of " all the land from the 
river of Naumkeag [now Salem], round Cape Anna, to the river Merri- 
mack, and up each of these rivers to the farthest head thereof; then to 
cross over from the head of one to the head of the other." This district 
was called Mariana. Another Plymouth grant, to Mason and Gorges 
conjointly, made in 1622, gave the district of Laconia to be "bounded 
by the Merrimack, the Kennebec, the ocean, and the river of Canada." 
But in 1627 the Plymouth company granted to Sir Henry Roswell and 
others a tract extending from three miles south of the Charles river to 
three miles north of every part of the Merrimack river. The multiplicity 
of conflicts is evident ; but the troubles of our forefathers in the matter 
are practically those which took form in the long continued contest 
between the colonies of Massachusetts and New Hampshire in respect to 
their dividing line, since in the progress of events ultimately it was de- 
cided that this dividing line was the same as the southern boundary of the 
valid claims of John Tufton Mason, as heir of his great-grandfather, 
John Mason. But this decision was not rendered until 1745, and during 
the intervening years the question had been a burning one, not merely as 



PROCEEDINGS. 39 

to the doubly granted three-mile strip along the north bank of the Merri- 
mack, but also in reference to the much more weighty question concerning 
the head of that river. In 1653 commissioners were sent by the General 
Court of Massachusetts to determine and mark that boundary point, who, 
performing that duty, left upon a rock their own initials and the name of 
John Endicott, governor. This stone, concealed by the rising of the 
waters of Lake Winnipiseogee, and forgotten for many years, was dis- 
closed to view in 1830, and within recent years has been raised from the 
obscuring sand and water and grinding ice, and by action of the State of 
New Hampshire has been protected by an edifice of stone as a memento 
of a barely escaped peril to the existence of our embryonic state. The 
question, indeed, may well be asked how it is that we are here to-day, 
natives of New Hampshire, if the Merrimack to its source was granted to 
Massachusetts, and the question may be hard to answer. A current tra- 
dition is that at the time of the practical settlement that the northern line 
of Massachusetts should cross the Merrimack as now, midway between 
the present sites of the great manufacturing cities, Lowell and Nashua, a 
surveyor reported that at the place of crossing the river all its water could 
run through a quart cup. If so, he doubtless omitted to state the time 
required for such passage at the usual rate of flow, and relied for the 
justice of the survey upon the obvious fact that the grant was made under 
a belief that the general course of the river was from the west, and there- 
fore, when a point was reached above which it came from the north, there 
evidently the spirit of the grant outweighed its exact letter. This per- 
haps too long departure of our thought beyond the geographic limits of 
our town may tend to a clearer understanding of what we may term its 
double birth. It is a suggestive coincidence that the year in which the 
name of John Endicott, a man who had once forfeited his governorship 
for a year for the offence of cutting the cross of St. George from the flag 
of the Salem militia company, a man a century before his time in seeking 
for more and more home government for the colonies, that the year in 
which this name was cut upon the centre of our state in formal refusal to 
recognize the claim of men of English and Episcopal affiliations, Mason 
and Gorges, was the year when Cromwell turned the key behind the Long 
Parliament. Under the Commonwealth no resistance to the claim so 
powerfully sustained by Puritan influence was practicable. Before this 
date the settlements in Maine had voluntarily submitted to the govern- 
ment of Massachusetts, the grandson and namesake of the proprietor 
conveying his proprietary rights for the sum of £1,250 in cash. But 



40 PROCEEDINGS. 

the Masonian claims were intermittently, yet urgently, pressed for eighty- 
five years after the restoration of the monarchy, until in 1745 the disputed 
region, in part at least, and that a part including this town, was decided 
to be the property of the claimant under the claim of his great-grand- 
father, John Mason. 

But during the later years of the pre-eminence of the Massachusetts 
claim her General Court had been freely granting the disputed land to 
settlers, and in 1736 the town of New Ipswich, occupying largely the 
land now included in it, but somewhat larger than the present town, had 
its first birth. So much can be ascertained from Massachusetts Records, 
which disclose the fact of the grant being made to inhabitants of the 
town of Ipswich ; yet scarcely another fact about the earliest activity in 
this town would now be known but for the discovery of a petition made 
to the General Court by the first grantees or their representatives praying 
for another grant by way of recompense for their loss involved in the 
decision in favor of John Tufton Mason. From this petition we learn 
of the erection of a meeting-house, sawmill, bridges, etc., to a larger ex- 
tent than we should have supposed probable in the limited time. 

This review of facts which may have become somewhat unfamiliar 
to those of us who have once known them leads to a comparison of the 
names preserved in this early document with those of the later history of 
the town, or it presents the question " to what extent is this really a New 
Ipsivich ? " 

Of the twenty-six claimants whose names are there found not a 
single one has its representative among the present citizens of New 
Ipswich, and only Isaac Appleton seems to have clung to his pioneer en- 
thusiasm and founded a family in the new town. It may be, however, 
that Benjamin Knowlton, whose family has disappeared from town within 
recent years, and who came from Ipswich, may have come in the right of 
one Captain Knowlton, an original grantee represented in the petition by 
one Abraham Knowlton. 

But we know that there were settlers from Ipswich not named in the 
existing documents. The two brothers, Ephraim and Benjamin Adams, 
men of great weight in town matters relating to both church and state, 
were here before the second organization of titles, but, after a long and 
honorable record, the name has disappeared. The first settler, Abijah 
Foster, was from Ipswich, but died while on service in the French war, 
and his family had passed from town years before the centennial. From 
the same town also came in later years, Benjamin Safibrd and Eben Brown, 



PROCEEDINGS. 41 

none of whose descendants are now residents in the town ; and the same 
is true of a number of families, presumably connected with the Ipswich 
families by ties of kindred or friendship, which came from the neighboring 
towns of Rowley, Boxford, Topsfield, LynnfieJd and Beverly. But the 
names of Batchelder, Mansfield, Newell and Towne are not found on the 
records of 1900. 

With the legal transfer of proprietary rights to the representative of 
John Mason all bonds between New Ipswich and its Massachusetts parent 
failed, until it seems that but little more of the early life than the name 
remained. The process of disintegration of the settlement was also 
accented by the threatening aspect of the Indians and a temporary deser- 
tion of the town by all the inhabitants except Capt. Moses Tucker, who 
alone remained in his home on the old road over Knight's hill. It is a 
pathetic thought that of this first enterprise scarcely any traces remain. 
Its house of worsliip, situated on the hill east of the academy, opposite 
the head of Safford lane, perhaps never used for the purpose of its erection 
and burned during the temporary desertion of the town, and the neighbor- 
ing burying place which received a few of the first dead, of these the 
exact location is unknown. Still it is certain that a few held on undis- 
mayed through the years of doubt from 1745 to 1749, as we find their 
names in the record of the permanent rehabilitation of the town. 

The Masonian proprietors had no wish to have their towns deserted, 
and apparently required little more than an acknowledgement of their 
claim before confirming the settlers in their holdings, although the petition 
from which names of the Ipswich grantees have been taken seems to sug- 
gest that there was very probably a difference in the recognition of the 
claims of actual settlers and of those who had not availed themselves of 
their charter rights before the transfer from the authority of Massachu- 
setts. At all events the spring of 1750 witnessed the birth of New Ips- 
wich, New Hampshire, by a grant from the agent of the Masonian pro- 
prietors to thirty men covering a tract of land which was practically that 
of our present town. 

Thirteen of these men were named as " of a place called New 
Ipswich, " for the christening by the General Court of Massachusetts evi- 
dently could not be recognized as having bestowed upon this social infant, 
now first recognized as existent by New Hampshire, a lawful title such as 
was rightly held by the nine other places whence came the remaining 
seventeen grantees. Neither could our poor " place called New Ipswich " 
acquire at the same time "a local habitation and a name," since it 



42 PROCEEDINGS. 

waited for any legal appellation until it had attained the age of twelve 
years, when in 1762 it was duly incorporated as a town bearing the name 
of Ipswich, the prsenomen "New" for some reason not being added 
until 1766. 

We now look at the list of the second fathers of the town and seek 
whether they still remain in the persons of their posterity in this town 
won from the wilderness by their power. The thirteen having no habita- 
tion except New Ipswich at the time of the Masonian charter were Reuben 
Kidder, Archibald Foster, Jonas Woolson, Habijah Foster, John Brown, 
Benjamin Hoar, Jr., Timothy Heald, Joseph Kidder, Joseph Bullard, Eben- 
ezer Bullard, Joseph Stevens, Henry Pudney, and John Chandler. The 
minister's rate for 1763, thirteen years after the charter, shows assessments 
against all of these except Habijah Foster who, as has been said, died in 
military service before 1760, and Henry Pudney, of whom no record is 
found except that in the drawing of lots he received the one upon which 
Ichabod Howe, who came to town in 1754, was living in 1759. It may 
perhaps be assumed that he never became an actual citizen of the place. 
But of the remaining eleven names of those whom we may consider in a 
sense to have been ante-Masonian proprietors, and to have entered earn- 
estly upon the new plans for the town, and six of whom we find to have 
been elected to positions of responsibility by their fellowtownsmen, there 
remains today in the town but one representative, a great-granddaughter 
of Joseph Bullard. Of the seventeen grantees from other towns, concern- 
ing twelve there is no evidence that they ever occupied the lots assigned 
them so far as to build upon them and reside there ; one was residing upon 
his lot six years after the charter, but his name fails to appear in the 
record of the minister's rate for 1763. Another, Andrew Spaulding, 
signed the church covenant at the organization of the church in 1760, 
but probably did not become a permanent resident, his lot being occupied 
by his sons. Only three names remain, those of Thomas Adams, Isaac 
Appleton, and Benjamin Hoar, the first of whom apparently never came 
here to reside, but was doubly represented by his two sons, Ephraim and 
Benjamin Adams, to whom reference has before been made as represent- 
ing the Ipswich contingent. Both of their names and also those of 
Messrs. Appleton and Hoar are among those of whose places in the activi- 
ties of our town, influential and honorable, we can now speak only as 
matter of history. 

It has appeared, therefore, that the procession of the ages, extending 
though it may only through a period of six brief generations, has borne 



PROCEEDINGS. 43 

from amid these hills every name save one of those who participated in 
the work of one hundred and fifty years ago. 

If now, shortening the period of investigation, we seek the names 
of New Ipswich families extending throughout the nineteenth century, 
the resulting list is not long. The families settled in the town before the 
beginning of that century number about one hundred, but of these only 
sixteen have maintained their places among the citizens of New Ipswich 
until its closing year, although a few names honored among our ances- 
tors, like Champney, Fox, and Gould, are still found among those who 
each year seek recreation amid the summer influences of their ancestral 
homes. 

Following Joseph Bullard previously mentioned, who was here in 
1743, we first find Jonas Wheeler coming as early as 1758, before the 
legal incorporation of the town, and remaining a citizen of the town for 
fifty-seven years until his death at the age of ninety-four. His name 
does not appear prominently in the records, but his son Seth, himself one 
of the early New Ipswich settlers, since he was a native of Concord, and 
came to this town at the age of five years, was elected selectman at the 
age of thirty-four and held that office for thirteen consecutive years, thus 
manifesting a habit of the family through succeeding generations. The 
third name in the list of families still remaining in town has been found 
in places of honor and trust since the first John Preston of New Ipswich 
came to this place from Littleton in 1760, and at the early age of twenty- 
four was elected a member of the first board of selectmen. At about the 
same date, perhaps a little later, Thaddeus Taylor came from Dunstable 
and settled in the southwest corner of the town, where his son, one of 
the early preceptors or our academy, was born, and whence has sprung a 
New Ipswich family not large in numbers, but whose enduring energy is 
witnessed by its representative now one of the oldest of our citizens. Pass- 
ing the date of incorporation, Charles Barrett came from Concord in 
1764, founding the family well known in the manufacturing, commercial 
and financial enterprises of the town ; and the succeeding year brought 
from the same mother-town James Chandler, members of whose family 
have been resident upon some portion of his farm near the south line of 
the town, or in that immediate neighborhood, until the present time. 
From him, as a member of the Committee of Correspondence, Inspection 
and Safety, his widely scattered descendants have derived titles to mem- 
bership among the Sons and Daughters of the Revolution. At about the 
same date John Wheeler also settled in the south part of the town on a 



44 



PROCEEDINGS. 



farm near the "old county road" which still remains in the possession of 
his family. The name is now represented by descendants of three sons 
of the first settler. Silas Davis, of the large family bearing that name 
in Concord, came here in 1768, settling upon Flat Mountain. His family 
has been well known in the south part of the town until the present 
time. A name frequently found in the records of town officers through 
several generations is that of Wilson, the family having descended from 
Supply Wilson, who came here from Woburn in 1759 before he had 
attained his majority. Paul Prichard at the mature age of fifty came to 
this place in 1772 from what is now Boxford, Mass., settled on the north 
road to Greenville, and during the remainder of his life held a very influ- 
ential place amid the activities of the town, as his descendants have also 
done until the recent death of the last of our citizens bearing the hon- 
ored name. The name of James Barr, borne by father and son, has been 
held in honor since the father came from Scotland in 1774, and held by 
the power which, as Saxe assures us, " makes the world go round, " made 
his abode here. The name of Simeon Blanchard, who purchased the 
farm on the south line of the town which was occupied by his family for 
nearly a century, first appears on the tax roll in 1776, although he may 
have been a somewhat earlier resident. Probably about 1780 the farm 
just east from Smithville, known as the Goen farm, received its name from 
its purchase by John Goen, just arrived from Reading. The Revolution- 
ary soldier, Zaccheus Walker of Andover, came here at the close of his 
service, and through the influence of his marriage settled just east from 
the school house in the Gibson district, in which section of the town his 
descendants have continued their residence. And our list of eighteenth 
century founders of families is completed by the names of Benoni Buck- 
nam, who came from Boston in 1795, and Joseph Wheeler, whose name 
first appears in the closing year of the century. 

If the disappearance of the early families of our town seems unduly 
near complete, it is of course largely accounted for by the same cause or 
causes, whatever they may be, which have brought about another condi- 
tion which we may not ignore, but which we shall do well to consider 
with careful freedom from the repining in which it is easy to indulge, as 
we recognize the decreasing number of the town's inhabitants. 

The population of our town during its first half century, from 1750 
to 1800, rose rapidly for the first part of the period and more slowly 
afterward, but within the time multiplied its numbers by ten, rising from 
120 to 1,241, a statement based partly upon estimate, but such as ensures 



PROCEEDINGS. 46 

the fact of a continued increase. The first half of the nineteenth century 
was fitful ; for, although the net result was an increase of fifty per cent, 
from 1241 to 1878, the successive decades were alternately periods of 
advance and retrogression, the decade ending in 1820 presenting a loss of 
115, and the decade ending in 1840 a loss of 95 inhabitants. Still 
these were far outbalanced by the gains of the intermediate periods, and 
we came to our centennial with an advance of nearly twenty per cent, 
during the immediately preceding decade, and without any warning dis- 
cernable by ordinary vision that we were entering upon a long era of 
unbroken descents, decade after decade destined to reduce our numbers 
from their high- water census mark of 1878 successively through 1701, 
1380, 1222, 969, until the census of the close of the century shows only 
911 names, a descent but little relieved by the consideration that the lo.ss 
of the last decade was but six per cent, instead of the twenty-one per 
cent, of the decade immediately preceding, the most discouraging period 
of our history in this respect, since even the Civil war forced a loss of only 
nineteen per cent, during the decade from 1860 to 1870. It is improb- 
able that there was any sudden change in the rate of decrease about ten 
years ago. Rather we must believe that the rapid descent affected the 
decade now closing to some extent, and we may reasonably greet the de- 
creased rate of loss reported by the census of 1900 as an indication of 
reversal of the tide. 

But this encouragement may not be sufficient to forbid our speaking 
despairingly or contemptuously of New Ipswich, according to the spirit 
prevailing within us, and declaring that the days of country New England 
are no more, or deriding the lack of energy existing amid those into whose 
hands the ancestral homes have passed. But does it not rather befit us, 
as loyal sons and daughters of New Ipswich, and especially upon this 
anniversary, to seek the varied causes of the facts which lead to adverse 
conclusions, to ask whether these things are necessarily tokens of debase- 
ment, and whether, so far as the changes in local conditions are to be 
deplored, there is not reasonable cause for an expectation that a reverse 
current will ensue in due time ? 

New Ipswich by no means stands solitary in her present position. 
Long is the list of country towns whose numbers have grown smaller and 
smaller with successive census reports ; and for nearly all of the large 
class we may recognize at least three potent causes of the change, the 
opening of the western country, the increased facilities for transportation, 
and the Civil war. All of these have affected our own town perhaps 



46 PROCEEDINGS. 

somewhat more strongly than has been the case with many towns in other 
regions apparently equally exposed to their power, because of a character- 
istic inherited from the settlers of New Ipswich, to which it is doubtful 
if merited attention has been given. Our examination of the previous 
homes of these settlers showed that no very large fraction of the whole 
number came from Ipswich and the surrounding towns, but that a large 
part of the grantees under the Masonian charter apparently belonged to 
that great class of adventurers, who, one hundred and fifty years ago, as 
now, seem to have been ready to enter upon new projects, and equally 
ready to abandon them after the first charm of novelty had passed, or the 
unduly roseate expectations of remarkable and speedy success had paled. 
Filling the places of these more mercurial adventurers, whose names are 
entirely unfamiliar to New Ipswich annals, came those men who have 
been already mentioned as founders of well-known families of the town, 
and many others, like Batchelder, Champney, Farrar, and Gould, whose 
names, although not of the present, occupy large and honored places 
in the past. A. review of these can hardly fail to call attention to the 
large proportion that came from a group of towns in Middlesex county, 
stretching from Cambridge toward the northwest, and united by bonds of 
common interest and kindred. Of these towns Concord is typical ; and a 
native of New Ipswich, familiar with the traditions of his town, can 
hardly visit the burying grounds of this Massachusetts town without fre- 
quent surprise, as familiar names meet his sight upon the tombstones. 
These towns may indeed be termed ancestral towns. John Fiske calls 
attention to the fact that " it was in one and the same week that Charles I. 
began his experiment of governing without a parliament, and that he 
granted a charter to the Company of Massachusetts Bay." The resulting 
exodus to these shores, under the leadership of widely differing, but per- 
haps equally able men, like John Winthrop and Thomas Dudley, with 
the purpose of undertaking a task " not to be achieved without steadfast 
and sober heroism," was not an undertaking of fickle, uncertain men, but 
of those having in large measure " the courage of their convictions," of 
men who calmly considered the courses before them ; and it is hardly too 
much to say that when they chose to enter upon a new work, that choice 
determined success. The group of towns which I have mentioned was 
pre-eminently of this blood, mixed, however, with a lesser stream from 
the Plymouth Colony, schooled perhaps equally to an unwavering and 
fearless fidelity to deliberately chosen purpose. Hence, we may believe, 
came in large part the rapid growth, in this region offering nothing beyond 



PROCEEDINGS. 47 

reasonable return to faithful endeavor, of our infant town in its first 
quarter century. But, because of this inherited strength, it may be that 
our townsmen in an especial degree have calmly and deliberately under- 
taken pioneer projects, and entered open doors appearing in distant 
regions, until the early families have disappeared, as we have seen. 

Macaulay has written: "Those projects which abridge distance have 
done most for the civilization and happiness of mankind," and surely by 
nothing has the last half of this century, notable for so many inventions, 
been more characterized than by the class of projects to which he refers. 
When we met in centennial celebration. New England possessed only 2,600 
miles of railroad, and the entire country had but 8,600. But even then, 
this eastern portion of our national domain was so well provided that its 
mileage has hardly been trebled by the period of wonderfully advancing 
construction, while for the whole country the ratio of increa.se doubtless 
exceeds twenty. These simple figures alone suggest volumes of explana- 
tion of an increasing removal of men having the characteristic energy of 
our sires; not because changes of the fields of profitable endeavor have 
been made easy ; such men are not devotees of ease ; but because facilities 
of transportation make the successful result of their labors not merely 
possible, but probable. 

Yet not only by multiplying opportunities for the exercise of the 
masterful tendency to which I have called attention, do these changed 
conditions tend to draw population from the more retired localities. In 
the days of our fathers, or our grandfathers, when fifty miles, the distance 
from this town to Boston, even by the exceptionally rapid means of trans- 
portation afforded by the stage, was a long day's journey, while private 
conveyances were wont to stop over night at Groton, and the humbler 
traveller regarded the means provided him personally by nature as the 
most reasonable means of pursuing a journey, Farmer Brown, upon the 
top of the mountain, was only by a single hour's travel more retired than 
the residents of the centre village. But this hour becomes a largely 
objectionable addition to the journey, when the work of the long day 
is gathered within the compass of one fourth of its former duration, or in 
many places, where rapid transportation approaches more nearly than it 
has yet to New Ipswich, a single hour covers the time of a previously long 
journey. Hence it has resulted that thousands of Farmer Brown's farms, 
like those of our own town, have been deserted for the villages, which in 
turn have yielded to analogous attractions of larger gatherings; and, 
while a half century ago only one-eighth of our people were residents 



48 PROCEEDINGS. 

of cities containing 8,000 inhabitants or more, it has come to pass that 
in 1890 almost three-tenths were thus dwelling, and probably before the 
present time more than one-third of the entire population has become 
thus aggregated. 

But a far more potent result of this change in conditions is found in 
the certainty that business must necessarily follow the lines of rapid 
transportation. A century ago the dwellers in Fitchburg recognized the 
enterprise and business ability of New Ipswich by making in this place 
their occasional purchases of such articles as their farms did not supply. 
It is by no means easy at the present day to bring into clear vision the 
habits of life and of business of the early years of this century. We 
may suppose that one of our ancestors has come to that interesting point 
in his life when, having won the affections of our ancestress, and having 
by patient labor acquired that with which he may meet the necessary 
expenditures of the contemplated step, he is about to enter upon the 
enlarged life of complete manhood. Obviously at this time a suitable 
personal outfit must be provided, and he is entirely spared all harassing 
decision between the claims of economy in favor of a rather more elegant 
sale suit than has constituted his ordinary wear and the desire to do full 
honor to the ceremony by appearing attired in more perfectly fitted cus- 
tom work, since "ready made" clothing has not yet appeared in the 
market. He may, however, find excellent goods of wool grown on New 
Ipswich farms, and spun and woven in New Ipswich homes, but fortu- 
nately redeemed from its homespun aspect and given a truly elegant 
appearance due to its having been fulled and dressed by John Everett in 
his newly erected mill operated by the Gibson Village water power. Hav- 
ing made his purchase, he well knows that it is only a short distance to the 
meeting of the roads which offers a compromise location for the erection 
of the fourth meeting house, in which we are now assembled, near which 
Ezra Kimball is ready to take his measure and employ his best skill in 
the construction of a suitable wedding suit. A further walk of half a 
mile brings our prospective bridegroom to the shop of King & Preston, 
just below the present academy grounds, where he may obtain a hat made 
to order, and therefore sure to fit. It may be, however, that the need of 
suitable provision for his feet requires a little farther travel, but we may 
be sure that Phineas Pratt, dwelling half a mile from Pratt pond, can 
make the needed boots, very probably of leather from the tannery of Jere- 
miah Prichard, unless that founder of a New Ipswich industry has ceased 
from his labors, in which case the work is certainly continued by Isaac 



PROCEEDINGS. 49 

Spaulding in the same location at the foot of old " Meeting-house Hill" 
so long devoted to that industry. The fitting out of the new home neces- 
sarily requires a visit to " Tophet Swamp "' and the newly established 
chair shop of Peter Wilder, but, since his industry is more specialized in 
its ends than that of most cotemporaneous artisans, the new household is 
dependent for the few other articles of furniture demanded by the simple 
habits of the time upon the shop of Joseph Bacheller upon " Meeting- 
house Hill, " or that of some other one of the competent joiners of the 
town. It is uncertain what workman of the time under review can sup- 
ply our ancestor with a farm wagon ; but he needs no other vehicle, since 
the farm horse with saddle and pillion will bear the couple on Sundays to 
the old meeting-house on the hill. The saddle, however, probably comes 
from the shop of Silas Cragin ; and the most important of the implements 
with which the labor of the hardest month of each year is to be per- 
formed, the scythe, we may trace from the shop of John Putnam at the 
site of the present Walker shops ; nor is it likely that our ancestor has 
need of passing far beyond the borders of the town to find the place of 
manufacture of any article required by the new farm and the new home. 

Fifty years ago the industries of our town may have been somewhat 
less complete in meeting all the needs of residents ; but at that time 
the smaller industries had not been crushed by such concentration of 
energies in large establishments as brings the price to consumers below 
that which can remunerate artisans working under earlier conditions. 
At the time of our centennial, beside the Wilder shops still continuing in 
the northwest corner of the town. Smith Village had three chair shops in 
successful operation, or about to begin, those of Charles Taylor, Stephen 
Sylvester, and Jonas Nutting, now all closed by the changed conditions. 
The wheelwright shops of William Hassall, Richard H. Davis, Roby 
Fletcher, and Seth Straton each usually employed one or more hands be- 
side the proprietor, and were largely occupied in actual manufacture, 
while at the present time shops offering that line of work in towns of the 
size of ours from necessity are practically confined to repairs. The saw- 
nnills of Jonas Nutting, George C. Gibson, Daniel Farwell, Henry 
Adams. Emery Carr, Ebenezer Converse, and Luke Cram, all in activity 
in or near the year I80O, are now represented by only three mills which, 
however, have recently shown such increased activity as may be considered 
an earnest of an approaching reversal of some of the unfavorable condi- 
tions of later years. The wooden manufactures of various kinds in con- 
nection with these mills may perhaps in part compensate for the decay of 

4 



50 PROCEEDINGS. 

the chair industries before mentioned, although far from completely ; 
and the water power employed by William Walker fifty years ago in his 
bedstead factory is still utilized in the wood-turning industry by his son. 

Only one blacksmith's shop in 1 900 takes the place of those of John 
C. Hildreth, Russell Farwell, Augustus Russell, John T. Stevens, and 
Charles Bateman of 1850. The tanneries of Amos Pierce and Stedman 
Houghton have no successors ; neither the tin-shops of the Sanders 
Brothers and of Boynton, Stark & Carroll, nor the saddlery of Cyra L. 
Weston. Two small shops for the manufacture of cigars are all that now 
represent the industries of Stephen Thayer and of Moses Brickett, who in 
1850 employed one hundred hands in the varied manufactures of matches, 
ink, blacking and essences as well as cigars, the last named article also 
suggesting the allied production of cigar boxes by Harvey Batchelder at 
the earlier date. The bakery of N. Smith has a small successor at the 
Bank Village. Some small industries may have escaped mention in con- 
nection with both dates. 

But in one sense the most striking indication of the trend of business 
conditions in our town is shown by the closing of two of the three cotton 
factories of 1850, and a union of the third with the factories in Greenville 
so complete as to threaten the integrity of the boundaries of our town, a 
change involving a reduction in the number of New Ipswich employees 
from about 275 to only 85 ; although the improvement in mechanical 
facilities has so increased the product that it is believed to exceed that of 
the earlier date. 

The second condition tending to cause an exodus from the small 
country towns of the East, the opening of the broad expanse of the West 
and the discovery that the "Great American Desert" of our geographies, 
published even nearly or quite as recently as 1850, is largely a myth, 
may perhaps be justly declared to be in part a result of the increased 
facilities for transportation already considered. But with equal justice 
this may rightly be considered a cause of the remarkable increase of those 
facilities, a change imperatively demanded in order to hold the increasing- 
ly wide extent of our nation together. And without doubt the belief 
inculcated in our youth by boasts like that of the song of "Uncle Sam's 
Farm" so often heard in our schoolrooms fifty years ago, which de- 
clared 

" Of all the mighty nations in the East or In the West, 
Oh I this glorious Yankee nation is the greatest and the best, 
We have room for all creation, and our banner is unfurled. 
Here's a general invitation to the people of the world," 



PROCEEDINGS. 61 

this belief, fortified and sustained by the fertility of much of the land 
opened to pioneers, has ^ne far in drawinfj; the population of the Eastern 
country towns away, not always directly to the idealized prairies and 
mines, but in no less measure to take the places of those leaving the more 
dense communities of the East. 

The tendencies of our Civil war to diminish the population is mark- 
edly impressed upon us, when we read in our census reports that the 
increase in the entire country from 1860 to 1870 was only twenty-two 
and six tenths per cent., while the preceding and following decades 
yielded thirty-five and six tenths and thirty per cent., respectively. And 
the country places have been the ultimate losers, sending from their 
numbers to supply the loss in the urban population. Thus in our own 
state, during that decade of devastation and death, there was a decrease 
of population amounting to two and four tenths per cent., while the pre- 
ceding decade had given a slightly larger per cent, of increase, and the 
following decade an increase of nine per cent. Looking at our own coun- 
ty, with its two manufacturing cities, prosperous and rapidly increasing 
during the last half of the war decade, we see that the three decades 
from 1850 to 1880 gave as successive per cents, of increase eight and one 
tenth, three and three tenths, and seventeen and seven tenths. But our 
little town, as we have seen, suffered in these decades successive losses of 
nine, nineteen, and eleven per cent. 

An additional element of loss is without doubt that which ever ap- 
pears at the close of wars. Many of the returning soldiers who, but for 
their knowledge of regions outside their ancestral habitat might have 
passed their lives contentedly in the places of their birth, find themselves 
unable to rest in quiet conditions, and must needs seek more pronounced 
activities. 

Does it seem that the facts under consideration are strangely un- 
suited to an occasion like this, when we gather in honor of our early 
home and in grateful recognition of her gifts to us ? Or is it true that 
the sons of New Ipswich have sufficiently true loyalty to their mother to 
yield naught of their allegiance because of their recognition that in the 
course of advancing civilization the work which each country and state 
and each smaller unit has laid upon it radically changes as the years 
pass by ? The great social forces, like Him who ordained them, are 
never in haste. Not reformers alone are prone to forget this truth, and to 
chafe at the tardiness of results. We are all inclined to be restless or 
despairing, as our moods may be, when events do not conform to our 



52 PROCEEDINGS. 

ideas of true advantage. We say that the day of country places has 
gone by. Perhaps that is true of the forms of country life which our 
early associations tend to make us judge the only real forms; and the 
change to the form of the future, not yet developed, perhaps necessarily 
leads through a period which at least has a certain appearance of approach- 
ing decay. But is even this concession to the despondent view necessary 
in the case of our own little town? We of America are prone to an 
undue exaltation of the immense, and the value of small things is apt to 
be unappreciated among us. We forget that 

"Iron is heaped in mountain pilcB, 
A nd gluts the laggard forges, 
But gold-flakes gleam in deep defiles 
And lonely gorges." 

We meet to-day in a town of less than one-half as large population 
as greeted the assembly of fifty years ago ; to which we may join the 
suggestive fact that the number of its school children is only one-third of 
that of the centennial year. Is the town dying ? Surely a town which 
under such conditions, with its thirteen schools of 1850 reduced to six in 
1900, yet devotes to the education of its children once and one-third as 
much money as was expended at the earlier date, and provides for each of 
its scholars once and one-half as many weeks of instruction per year as 
did the New Ipswich which in 1850 stood very high among New Hamp- 
shire towns in its care for education, presents evidence that the old spirit 
of our ancestors, and the inherited determination to succeed, has far from 
perished. Moreover, the beautiful and constantly increasing library, the 
lighted streets, the provision for the prevention of destructive fires, and 
many other like changes from the conditions of fifty years ago seem to 
indicate most conclusively that the town is decidedly alive, and sees no 
need of preparation for an approaching dissolution. 

Such being the case, we may ask whether the three causes considered 
as having led to the decrease in population are constant in tendency or in 
results. The Civil war has passed, and we devoutly hope that no like 
penalty for national wickedness may again be visited upon us. The error 
involved in the refrain of the song before mentioned, a declaration that 
♦' Uncle Sam is rich enough to give us all a farm," is rapidly becoming 
evident to all. The tide of western emigration is not terminated, but it 
is strongly checked. Nor is this checking of the flow due merely to the 
approaching exhaustion of what a half centurv ago seemed the exhaust- 
less supply of virgin soil. The days of belief in the perennial productive- 



PROCEEDINGS. 53 

ness without fertilization, of the boundless prairies ready for cultivation 
without clearing of forests, is rapidly passing away, and the visions of 
sudden wealth for the agriculturalist have faded. There are eddies and 
tendencies to return currents in the tide, as it is found that there are 
blanks as well as prizes in the enterprise, and experience tends to a 
pleasurable recollection of the surer, if sometimes less abundant, crops 
drawn with more labor from the ancestral acres. It is far from wise to 
predict with any strong confidence the exact order of economic events ; 
but it seems sure that, as population becomes more dense throughout the 
country, land will have a larger place in the resources of the agricultur- 
alist in proportion to labor than is the case at present ; and with this com- 
ing condition in mind certain tables and maps in the census report for 
1890 become very suggestive. These tables show the value of the agri- 
cultural products of the different portions of our land per square mile, 
and the accompanying maps indicate by different depths of shading the 
same facts. The state of Massachusetts stands first in this respect among 
the states. A few small tracts in its eastern portion, and certain other 
favored locations on the Atlantic coast, have the richest shade denoting 
places in the sixth class, which produce over $5,000 per square mile. 
Our town, however, lies not in that most highly favored region, but in 
the considerably broader and more widely scattered, but still quite limited 
area of the fifth class, producing between $2,500 and $5,000 per square 
mile. In the face of this fact it is certainly rash to pronounce a perpetual 
condemnation of New Hampshire farms. Our farms were redeemed from 
the wilderness by the labor of emigrants of the good English stock. 
Possibly other emigrants of equally valuable habits and character may 
redeem them again from their period of rest. The Scandinavians find 
here a soil like that of their own homes, and they make excellent Ameri- 
can citizens. Were the suggestion of ways and means the object of this 
meeting, it might be well to consider the practicability of inviting to our 
midst this element, already favorably in evidence in the more northern 
portions of our state. 

Neither, we may believe, does the advancing civilization, declared by 
Macaulay to be so greatly promoted by projects for the abridgement of 
distance, necessarily and permanently tend to a depletion of less accessi- 
ble districts, such as has so frequently resulted in towns to which the 
railroad has closely approached, but failed to enter. We may well call 
to mind that the railroad is not the only factor in the abridgement of 
distance, although the one which hitherto has usually had the first place in 



54 PROCEEDINGS. 

the social changes of any region. At the time of our centennial the 
first practical message had been sent over the initial telegraph line, between 
Washington and Baltimore, only about six years, and the telephone had 
its birth in the middle of the period which has since elapsed. The first 
express line, even between Boston and New York, antedated the tele- 
graph but a few years. The electric car is practically the gift of the last 
decade. We have seen that the railroad has separated the land into two 
parts, the one, having all sections closely connected by the iron bands, to 
a certain extent acts as a unit, and prospers materially at the expense of 
comparatively isolated districts. But other developments of these later 
decades present manifest tendencies toward overcoming the solitude of the 
regions wasted by unsatisfactory conditions in respect to the railroad. 
The electric lines are already relieving the pressure of city population, 
and making a constantly increasing extent of surrounding towns practic- 
ally suburban. Time forbids more than a reference to the manifest effect 
of the rapidly extending telephone lines, of the development of systems 
for the rapid transfer of purchases by mail and express from the phe- 
nomenally immense mercantile establishments of the cities, of the im- 
proved mail facilities now especially manifest in the institution of rural 
delivery, already reaching one retired section of our own town. All 
these have had clearly perceptible effect in the line suggested, and promise 
to press on still more rapidly in the opening decades of the twentieth 
century in forms not yet devised, until the isolated town can hardly be 
found. Any attempt to foretell the work of New Ipswich in the coming 
century would be presumptuous, but hardly as much so as to assume 
her necessary continuance along the old paths of methods now passing 
into conditions of disuse analogous to those which have obliterated 
the old county road west of Governor's hill, and are rapidly accomplish- 
ing a like work upon the one extending from Bank Village over 
Knight's hill. 

Our forefathers chose the elevated sections of the town for their 
farms, while the lot upon which the tent for the centennial dinner was 
pitched, just across the street from the Barrett mansion, in early days 
almost a swamp covered with a worse than useless tangle of brush, was 
so little valued that "as poor as Joe Kidder's lot" was a proverb of worth- 
lessness. A century of cultivation and of washing rains has removed 
the fertile soil of the mountain farms, and many of us have seen the 
heavy burden of hay cut from the " Joe Kidder lot. " A half century of 
comparative rest has been restoring the deserted farms and, as we believe, 



PROCEEDINGS. 65 

not in vain, although we may not yet see their future place in coming 
industries. 

But, whatever these events of the future may be, the great work of 
these lines of intercommunication gives a joyous color to our thoughts, as 
we meet here, along lines upon which we can hardly err. This great 
work is the extending of fellowship, the broadening of brotherhood. It 
is far less true of the thoughts of New Ipswich youth of to-day than when 
the words were written fifty years ago, even though it be equally true of 
their vision, that "the pillared hills of childhood bound the world. " 

A century ago fears were entertained that, in case the seat of the 
national government should be removed to the banks of the Potomac, 
the representatives of New England would resign their seats in Congress 
in preference to undertaking the perilous journey through wilderness and 
morass to the capital. Fifty years ago many Englishmen strenuously 
opposed the projected World's Fair, because they did not wish to have 
England overrun by citizens of inferior civilization, — a notable survival 
of the ancient estimate of Jew and Gentile, Greek and barbarian. The 
" Greater England" so often in our hearts to-day was hardly a possibility 
of thought then. 

Not quite a century ago a young lady in what is now our neighbor- 
ing city, but then somewhat distant town, of Keene was united in mar- 
riage to an army officer stationed at Fort Dearborn on the present site of 
Chicago. Her friends bade her a more lingering farewell than would now 
characterize a departure to the farthest isles of the sea. The bridal trip 
to the new home was expected to occupy a month, during one-half of 
which the party would travel on horseback accompanied by a train of 
packhorses with their belongings. It is entirely possible that children of 
this couple have passed over the intervening miles in less hours than the 
days of their parents' journey. 

At a period, then, in which lines of geographical division are so fad- 
ing, and kindred hearts refuse to recognize them as separating bars, surely 
the New Ipswich we love and honor is bounded by the hills which wel- 
come our return only as it is defined in our joyous memories. We rejoice, 
indeed, to revisit these scenes whose beauties are heightened by grateful 
associations. But the real New Ipswich which greets us to-day, and 
which we cherish in thought, is a brotherhood and sisterhood of which 
only a small fraction can come together in body, but whose actual exist- 
ence is manifested in many ways, among which we may mention gifts like 
those of the Isaac Spalding School Fund of $10,000, and the Albert 



56 PROCEEDINGS. 

Stearns Lecture Fund of $3,000. No small part of the bond of our 
union above that of the children of many places is due, we may confi- 
dently assert, to the honored institution which joined together so many of 
the youth of the separated districts of the town at an age when such 
bonds of lasting strength are most readily formed. Dr. Gould, our orator 
of fifty years ago, strongly emphasized the work of our academy and its 
influence upon the town. Possibly it is a pardonable digression, if it be a 
digression from the spirit of this meeting, to recall that at that time the 
institution, declared to be so essential to the true prosperity of the town, 
was "struggling with bare means of subsistence and apprehensive of 
entire failure" because with advancing civilization the necessary demands 
for such an academy had increased beyond its resources, amply sufficient 
in its early days. I may recall to the memory of those who were present 
at the centennial dinner that an honored citizen of the larger New Ips- 
wich of those days was unable to be present in body, but sent this toast : — 
" The Literary Institutions of New Hampshire in general, and the acad- 
emy of New Ipswich in particular ; and to enable that institution to 
assume its former standing and extend its future usefulness, I, Samuel 
Appleton of Boston, do hereby promise to pay to the Trustees of New 
Ipswich academy, for the benefit of said academy, five thousand dollars 
on demand. " This unique toast, followed by other similar and even 
more substantial assistance from the same source, enabled our academy to 
enter upon its second period of prosperity. 

As we meet here again, the condition of fifty years ago is renewed. 
Again a constantly advancing standard of education makes demands be- 
yond the ability of our school to meet. The smaller academies elsewhere, 
as well as our own, are being pressed to the wall. The committee in 
charge of this reunion has expressed its purpose to follow the program 
of fifty years ago as far as is found practicable ; and we all sincerely hope 
that a toast having a power of inspiration equal to that which marked 
the movement adding the name of Appleton to our academy may be on 
the program for to-day. Our centennial orator said that he had been told 
that the sons of New Ipswich had accumulated more wealth than the 
sons of any other town of like numbers. We trust that this excellent 
power has not departed ; and surely the citizens of the Greater New Ipswich, 
either single or by united action, can in no way more fitly celebrate their 
meeting in spirit than by again bringing to the front amid such institu- 
tions the academy to which so many of them owe so much of their power- 
It is, of course, not at all practicable to say how great a part of the 
traits which we believe to be characteristic of the children of the town 



PROCEEDINGS. 57 

have resulted from the exceptionally good schools for which during many 
years she was noted, and in respect to which we trust she does not now 
fail, due, we may believe, very largely to the work of our academy. As 
many of us gratefully recall, the poet of to-day was fifty years ago a 
teacher in the academy, and also in our district schools. And we may 
note that from among his scholars of one winter there have come the 
president of to-day's meeting, the chaplain, the orator, and at least two 
other members of the so-called " learned professions, " a rather unusual 
coincidence for the history of a country district school. 

It is natural to dwell upon the successful public men of any locality in 
considering the character of the place of their origin, as we of New Ips- 
wich lay claim to the widely honored names of Timothy Farrar and 
Samuel Appleton. But this is a reasonable claim only as such examples 
are typical of the local character equally to be valued in narrower fields 
of activity. And we believe that the lives trained in New Ipswich 
obtained by heredity from the before cited class of ancestors an enviable 
strength now giving excellent results in widely separated fields of labor. 
We claim that, despite many present adverse aspects. New Ipswich is a 
typical Yankee town true to what Edward Everett Hale terms " the New 
England determination to get the thing done anyway. " To this bears 
witness that section of New Ipswich lying far away and known under the 
name of Denmark, Iowa, founded more than sixty years ago by a New 
Ipswich colony, and conducted upon New England principles. To this 
no less bears witness that home activity of enduring benevolent and edu- 
cational value, the children's fair, inaugurated nearly forty years since in 
the room below. 

We live in an epoch of difiierentiation, no less truly amid communi- 
ties than amid individuals. We all well know that a man may accom- 
plish far more of value now than in the days when each man was his own 
carpenter, ploughman, blacksmith, and shoemaker, even though his diverse 
capabilities were invaluable in the earlier stages of civilization. We 
recognize the fallacy of the early objection to railroads based on a belief 
that they would cause horses to become valueless. Horses have still a 
use in the processes of transportation ; and similarly in the broader prog- 
ress of civilization there awaits our town some worthy function, not yet 
fully defined, in this era of specialization among communities. 

As Yankees we of course devoutly believe Boston to be " the hub 
of the universe," and we enumerate the widely diverging radiant influ- 
ences sustaining that claim. A limitless Boston of orderly, intelligent, 



58 PROCEEDINGS. 

conscientious persistence has sprung from the little peninsula in Massa- 
chusetts Bay ; and, comparing great things with small, we know that the 
assembly of to-day bears testimony to the work of our New Ipswich. 

But as the scattered sons of New Ipswich sires, who with the char- 
acteristic ancestral desire to be in action have sought the more stirring 
places of labor, return and exchange the hearty greetings and the hand- 
shakes full of meaning, first and strongest in all the recognition of the 
elastic bonds which stretch, but break not, ever drawing toward the point 
of union, come the thoughts recently written: — 

" stout heai t-i have they who cross the seas 

And distant perils face, 
Who wish to 'scape from deadening ease, 

Or scale to higher place. 
But valiant, too, is he whose heart. 

Like theirs, would breast the foam, 
Yet at the old hearth keeps his part — 

The one who stays at home. 

New countries have great fields to reap. 

Need young and vigorous brain : 
But Motherland some sons must keep. 

To sow and bind her grain. 
The old folk, too, need some one there — 

They can no longer roam — 
Of all the flock there's one to spare— 

The one who stays at home. " 

Song by the Temple Quartette of Boston. 



POEM BY TIMOTHY PERRY, ESQ., of BROOKLYN, N. Y. 

Among the granite hills that skirt 

The valley of the Souhegan — 

In the shadow of Kidder mountain — 

Around old Whittemore hill, 

And off toward Watatic, 

Where the rainfall, wandering west. 

Seeks the Connecticut, 

Or east, the Merrimac, and where 

The bear, the deer, the catamount 

And the wild Indian. 

Roamed the primeval forest — 

Here eight-score years ago 

Our fathers, seeking a fitting place 

Where they might till the soil 

And worship God in peace. 

Sought out this rugged land. 

With them they brought no wealth of gold. 
No sounding titles, proud and old. 
No hope for unearned worldly gains 
Or for success that cost no pains. 



Proceedings. 69 

Better, they brought a conscience clear, 
Bold, honest hearts that knew no fear, 
Clear heails, strong arms and Iron wills, 
Firm and unchanging as the hills, 
Patience that waited for succiess, 
And found in labor happiness. 

They tilled the hard, unwilling soil, 
And with persistent care and toll 
From rocky hill or sandy plain 
Garnered the scanty yield of grain. 
They felled the thick-grown trees and reared 
Their cabins by the forest's edge. 
They built the schoolhouse and the church, 
Of faith, of law, of liberty. 
At once the safeguard and the pledge. 
And through the winter's snow and sleet. 
Through autumn's storms and summer's heat 
They labored on and knew no rest — 
A sentinel upon each crest 
Watching by every smoke that rose 
The stealthy step of unseen foes. 

But they wlio on themselves depend 
Are sure to conquer in the end; * 

And as the years go slowly by 
Comes the reward of industry. 
Fragrant the fields, the meadows fair. 
The sun shines brightly, and the air — 
No longer filled with wild alarms — 
Breathes soft and every fear disarms. 
Ricli harvests now the toilmen cheer. 
And peace and plenty crown the year. 

Then did our fathers turn to Him 
From whom their every blessing came. 
Whose guiding hand had led them on. 
Their hardships and their perils through. 
Out of a howling wilderness 
Into a smiling promised land. 
And grateful hearts burst forth in song — 
Song of thanksgiving and of praise. 

But hark! When all seemed calm and still 
What tempest now the east wind brings? 
Signalled from every watch-tower hill. 
Oppression comes on fiery wings. 
Sons of New Ipswich hear the din 
And in the furrow leave the plow, 
The deadly conflict to begin. 
And, resolution on each brow. 
Mustered their men with hasty drill 
And closed the ranks at Bunker Hill — 
To tyranny defiance hurled, 
" And fired the shot lieard round the world."* 

Long was the struggle, hard the fight 
By which our fathers proudly won 
Triumph for justice and for right; 
And when the conflict all was done 



*At least fifty New Ipswich men took part in the battle of Bunker Hill. See "His- 
tory of New Ipswich," Kidder and Gould, 1852. 



60 PROCEEDINGS. 

They raised the flag of liberty 
To float forever o'er the free. 

And when in later years the sound 
Of fierce Rebellion shakes the ground, 
And South to North the challenge sends, 
Once more the farmers rush to save 
Their liberties so dearly bought. 
And by their blood and valor gave 
Freedom to every cowering slave- 
To the Republic gave new life. 
Stronger and better for the strife. 
On many a hard and bloody field 
Our townsmen fought and bravely died; 
And when Rebellion's cohorts yield 
Victor and vanquished, side by side, 
Once more united, firmly stand. 
And heart to heart and hand to hand 
Build up a country strong and free. 
The home of peace and charity.* 

Such was the long and thorny road 
Our fathers trod, and such the school 
In which their children learned the worth 
Of hearts of granite, wills of steel, 
Of hope and courage for the right. 
Of honest industry and manly toil; 
And such the heritage they left 
Of sturdy strength and faith sublime. 
They built a town and ruled it well, 
Each man a king in his domain. 
But none o'erstepped his neighbor's rights. 
And justice reigned and sweet content. 

So, ever has New England taught 
Her sons by all her history 
That every obstacle they met 
Was but to them a stepping-stone 
By which they mounted to the heights 
Of honorable fame, and kept 
The sacred fires of liberty 
On every hilltop burning bright. 

So, ever have New England's sons 
The lesson learned, and wandering wide, 
They carry with them as they go 
Some fruitage of their native soil — 
The love of justice and, of right. 
The forceful, self-reliant zeal. 
The faith, the hope, the charity, 
The patient waiting fortitude 
That conquers every obstacle, 
And in a thousand hamlets helps 
To build a temple broad and firm- 

*New Ipswich furnished ninety-five volunteers enlisted in the Union army during 
the Rebellion. See "New Ipswich in the Civil War," Mrs. L. A. Obear, 1898. The names 
of nineteen of these volunteers, who lost their lives in the defense of their country, are 
inscribed on the New Ipswich soldiers' monument, which stands in front of the academy 
campus. 



PROCEEDINGS. 61 



The temple of a nation's fame, 

And hastens on the coming time 

When knowledge, truth and righteousness 

Shall blossom forth the wide world round. 

New England, 'neath whose sunny skies 
I trod the flowery paths of youth. 
Hath still a charm which time defies, 
The charm of beauty and of truth. 
Where'er my wandering feet may stray, 
Whatever skies may be above. 
My heart still fondly turns away 
Back to my own, my first true love. 
I love her stern and rock-ribbed hills, 
On whose bold tops the sunbeams rest 
After the flery king of day 
Has sunk In splendor in the west. 
I love her mountain brooks that flow 
Impetuous down the rocky glen, 
And foam and sparkle as they go 
Oflf to the meadows far below; 
I love her forests far and wide. 
Beneath the shadow of whose pines 
The rabbit and the wild grouse hide 
Among the tangled brush and vines; 
I love her stately elms that shade 
With leafy arms the roadway o'er; 
I love her spreading chestnut trees, 
Her maples and her mighty oaks; 
I love her meadows fair and green, 
Which by the river's margin He; 
I love her clear blue sky that spreads 
In beauty o'er the smiling land; 
I love her mountain air that gives 
New vigor to my pulse's flow; 
I love her people who drink in 
From all their glad environment 
The virtues that adorn their lives, 
Her stalwart men, her maidens fair. 
Strong, honest, simple and sincere; 
I love the calm and sweet repose 
And all the charm and witchery 
That, like a spell, forever hangs 
Around New England's peerless homes! 

And when, worn out, life's labors done. 
My old, dim eyes shall faintly see 
For the last time the setting sun 
Go down the west in majesty. 
Fain would I sink to silent dreams 
Amid the scene my vision fills. 
As come the sun's bright parting beams 
Over New England's gold-tipped hills. 
And sleep my last, eternal sleep 
Where spirits of the Pilgrims keep 
Their vigils and their guard around. 
Within New England's hallowed ground! 



62 PROCEEDINGS. 

At the close of the exercises at the church, the procession reformed 
and marched to the academy campus, where the dinner was served in a 
large tent by Caterer E. M. Read of Fitchburg, Mass. Plates were laid 
for 500 persons. 

After the feast the usual post-prandial exercises followed, inter- 
spersed with music from the band, and songs from the Temple Quar- 
tette of Boston. 

An artist secured views of the exterior of the tent as well as the 
interior ; the latter was obtained during the Governor's address. 

The official badge on satin ribbon bore a gilt outline of the State of 
New Hampshire on which was stamped the figure of the Old Man of the 
Mountain and the* state seal, with the inscriptions, 

150th Anniversary 

New Ipswich, N. H., 

Aug. 28, 1900. 

Welcome to our Sons and Daughters. 

LETTERS. 

The president of the day had letters and telegrams received from the 
following persons and several were read : 

S. Arthur Bent, Magnolia, Mass.; Rev. John S. Brown, Lawrence, 
Kan ; Hon. Isaac C. Stearns, Zumbrota, Minn.; Roby Fletcher, Fitch- 
burg, Mass.; Rev. Perley B. Davis, West Roxbury, Mass.; Edward A. 
Lawrence, Principal of N. I. Appleton Academy from 1844-51, Orange, 
N. J.; Hon. Frank G. Clarke, Peterboro, N. H.; Judge E. E. Parker, 
Nashua, N. H.; Melvin O. Adams, Esq., Boston, Mass.; Charles H. 
Clark, New York, N. Y. 

Magnolia, Mass., Aug. 15, 1900. 
Celebration Committee, 

Dear Sirs : — I wish it were possible for me to attend the celebra- 
tion at New Ipswich, to which you have kindly invited me. It is thirty- 
five years since I have seen the home of my youth. I should wander as 
a stranger through once familiar scenes. 1 should look in vain for most 
of the companions of my childhood. But even in that case I should like 



PROCEEDINGS. 63 

once more to walk to "High Kock," and the "Starch Factory Pond," 
or coast down the long hill which in winter carried some adventurous 
sleds, to pick blueberries with Henry Blood or scan Virgil with Cecil 
Bancroft. 

I well remember the centennial celebration, how the girls and boys 
lined the wall in front of Mr. George Barrett's house to cheer the ap- 
proaching guests preceded by a cavalcade of citizens ; how the venerable 
Hartwell Farrar replied to a toast by repeating the first lines : 

" You'd scarce expect one of my age, 
To speak in public on the stage," 

of the poem written for him in childhood by David Everett, Samuel 
Appleton's brother-in-law : and how the band crashed out in a triumphant 
blast, when Mr. Appleton's gift to the Academy was read. 

May your present festival rival the ancient one and bring together a 
happy throng of the sons and daughters of New Ipswich ! 

Very truly yours, 

S. Arthur Bent. 

Lawrence, Kansas, July 20, 1900. 
Celebration Committee, 

Dear Sirs .-—Greeting to the friends and good citi/.ens of the old 
town of New Ipswich, who on this one hundred and fiftieth anniversary 
gather to recite its history and recall old memories, and to greet friends 
and acquaintances. As I lie on my bed separated by the infirmities of 
age from most of the present events of life, my mind goes back to my 
early days, and I will give you an account of my early school days. I 
can dimly, very dimly, remember the time before I began going to school. 
Early as the year 1809, the summer I was just past three years of age, 
one Sally Jaquith taught our school. She was obliged to flog one of the 
boy.s for some flagitious conduct, and I recollect that my feelings were 
very severely tried by his piteous cries, while she applied vigorously the 
birchen rod to his naked back. 

Our home was just across the road opposite the school house, only a 
few rods distant, and I heard very plainly the poor boy's cry, " Oh ! Miss 
Jaquith, I will never, never do so again. Oh dear ! Oh! Oh! don't 
whip me any more. I will be good, just as true as I live. '" But Miss 
Jaquith put it on harder and harder, and the boy yelled louder and 
louder, till his ear-piercing shrieks entered my tender soul, and touched 
the very fountain of my tears. This whipping made a strong impression 



64 PROCEEDINGS. 

on my mind and inspired a deep awe of the school-room, and a fear of 
all school-ma'ams. 

My school days commenced the summer after I was four years old. 
On that first morning my mother dressed me carefully, and as she wiped 
my soft, chubby hands, she remarked, "Stilly," — my name was Still- 
man, — " Stilly, you must be sure to be a good boy at school. Mama 
would feel very bad to have those soft, pretty hands whipped by the 
teacher because you were naughty."' So I cried a little and promised to be 
a good boy, and then was led off by my sister Mary, who was quite 
proud of me, to school. I could not sit with her, for it was an invariable 
rule to have the boys and girls sit apart and on different seats. This rule 
was rigidly adhered to except in cases of flagrant disobedience, when we 
boys were sometimes made to sit with the girls as a punishment. 

In learning my letters I had to stand before my teacher and repeat 
the letters after her as she pointed to them with her scissors. We used 
at this time Webster's spelling book. The alphabet was printed nearly 
in the beginning of the book, the capitals and small letters being placed 
in perpendicular and parallel columns. I learned to say my a, b, c's 
before I could tell them when seen separately. I could tell the names of 
all the letters and began to combine them into syllables before the close 
of the summer term, which was considered very good progress. The 
first line I ever tried to read was, " No man may put off" the law of 
God" ; the second, " My joy is in His law all the day. " 

In 1810 Webster's spelling book was in general use all through 
New England and to a considerable extent through the United States. 
There were some wood cuts in it, which charmed our eyes and engaged 
our attention, while we sat for weary hours on our hard, high seats, wait- 
ing for our ten minutes' recess, or for our noon's or night's dismissal. 

When we went out of the schoolroom door, we were required to turn 
square around and make a bow to our teacher. Sometimes in our haste 
to get out, we but half performed the ceremony, just bobbing our heads 
side wise as we rushed out. In coming in we could go through "our 
manners" more gracefully. Our schoolhouse was on the public road, the 
turnpike as it was called. When we met travelers on the road either 
morning, noon or night or at recess, we had to make our manners to 
them. The boys would take off their hats and bow, the girls would stop 
and "courtesy." 

The first school master whom I recall was Joseph Brown, of Ashby. 
I went to him in the winter of 1810-11. It is very little that I recollect 



PROCEEDINGS. 65 

of him, the only circumstance that of "being called up" and made to 
stand on the floor, for what offense against the rules of school I forget. 
I was very much ashamed to be thus made the laughing-stock of the 
whole school, and there was a deeper tinge of slame when the affair was 
reported at home to mother and father. Mr. Brown afterwards studied 
for the ministry, and was sent as a missionary to some southern state. 
He was a member of the Congregational church. 

The " school-ma'ams," as the teachers of our summer schools were 
called, whom I remember were Sally Stearns, Sally Barr, Diademia 
Prichard, Sally Wetherbee, Nancy Batchelder, and I think a Miss 
Pratt. These, to the best of my recollection, were all kind, pleasant 
teachers, neither given to much scolding or whipping, but they treated us 
in a good, motherly way, leading us in the pleasant paths of learning and 
of virtuous conduct. The most dreary thing about the summer schools 
was the drilling that I was put through every Saturday forenoon in the 
catechism, otherwise termed the New England Primer. 

The winter schools were taught, while I had the privilege of attend- 
ing, by men, generally quite young men, who had attended an academy a 
term or two. Their names, as far as I can remember, were Joseph 
Brown, Isaac Kimball, Levi Nichols, Timothy Fox, Reuben Kidder 
Gould, Isaac Edes, William Moore, Addison Brown, my brother, Asaph 
Boutelle and Oilman Jones, who was my last district school teacher. 
Quite a number of large scholars went to school this winter : Sophronia 
Prescott, who afterwards married my brother Hermon, my sister Mary, 
Eliza Jaquith, Josiah P. Wilder, John Wilder, Calvin Wilder, Ann E. 
Wetherbee, who afterwards married my brother Addison, Joseph Bates 
Walton and others. Perhaps our teacher is still living ; he was a few 
years ago. He was from the neighboring town of Ashburnham, a faith- 
ful and laborious teacher, a somewhat odd genius, very distrustful of his 
own ability, but attached his scholars to him and was very much liked. 

The rod and the ferule were then indispensable in the administration 
of government, both at school and in the family, though some teachers 
had the tact to get along without applying them except on rare occasions. 
But they were always in sight as the insignia of authority, to be used as 
a last resort when other methods of punishment were unavailing. 

During the winter of Mr. Edes' administration there were many 
large boys and girls, who attended school and made things unusually 
lively by the display of rhyming and verse-making qualities. First ap- 
peared some thirty four-lined stanzas, printed on a sheet of rather coarse 

5 



66 PROCEEDINGS. 

paper and styled, "The Ladies' Looking Glass," the first verse of which 
started thus : 

" Alas! what pains the girls will take 
Themselves to sell and market make! 
What pains and sorrows they'll endure 
The eyes of men for to allure.'' 

And the second stanza is like unto it in smoothness of versification 
and beauty of sentiment : 

" They in the meeting house do sit 

All primmed up so neat and straight, 
Their thoughts and eyes around do rove 
On men, the objects of their love. 

" But there are girls, we must confess, 
VVho act from motives pure and just. 
Who look the priest right in the face, 
And hear him tell of saving grace. " 

And so on in like tenor through I forget how many lumbering 

stanzas. But the girls answered back in just about as many verses, some 

quite piquant, as, 

" They comb their locks and brush their boots, 
And think the girls admire their looks. 
But if they knew how we do hate 'em 
They'd use less blackball and pomatum. " 

Closing with the two eulogistic lines, 

" Nothing from nothing there remains 
Nothing but empty heads without the brains. " 

These verses are probably the highest poetic fiight that the school 
boys and girls on " Flat Mountain " ever attempted. I wish they could 
now be looked up as relics of a former generation arid a specimen of 
their rustic muse Tradition has it that the only contribution that the 
teacher made to these verses was the first word, " Alas !" I have a 
vague impression that our house was the headquarters of the committee 
of girls who put the finishing touches to the ansiver. These things may 
seem insignificant, but they loomed up in large proportions in the winter 
of 1817. 

Following the stream of time we come to the winter when Reuben 
Kidder Gould kept our school. He was a New Ipswich man and a very 
clever teacher. The last time I was in my native town, I read this 
inscription on the headstone of one of the graves, " Reuben K. Gould, 
died Dec. 19, 1870, aged 75 years and 7 months." I am probably the 
only one living who remembers him as a school teacher. He was a quiet 



PROCEEDINGS. 67 

farmer, never obtruding himself on public notice, never ambitious of show 
or heaping up riches, simple in his manners and contented with his lot. 
He pursued the even tenor of his way till the Old Man with his sharp 
SO) the mowed him down. I think he had no wife or children to shed 
tears over his grave. 

In our summer and winter schools we went over about the same 
course of studies, spelling, reading, writing, "ciphering," geography and 
grammar. In the summer the two latter studies were often omitted on 
account of the youth of the pupils. We used Adams' arithmetic. Every 
winter we began at the beginning, " Addition," and advanced as far as 
possible, each succeeding winter finding us a little farther than the winter 
before. The "Rule of Three" was always exceedingly puzzling. If 
we could state the "sum" aright, i. a , if we could get the first and 
second and third terms in their proper places, the rest was easy. We 
knew that by multiplying the second and third together and dividing by the 
first we should get the right amount. But to divine which was the first 
term, which the second and which the third exceeded our wits. There 
being but six possible arrangements of these numbers, one must be right. 
Sometimes the answer would come at the first trial, sometimes at the 
sixth. 

As there were no vulgar fractions in the first edition of this work, 
one element confusing to weak brains was eliminated. We had to deal 
only with decimal fractions. It would have been considered a feat of 
great mental dexterity to tell the sum of ^, ^ and ^ ; probably the 
brightest boy in school could not have done it. When I graduated from 
the common school, " Colburn's Mental Arithmetic" was published. 
This was a great improvement on all treatises of arithmetic. 

The books used for reading in the schools seventy years ago were 
"Webster's Spelling Book," "The Art of Reading," and "The Colum- 
bian Orator." There was a sprightly little piece beginning: 

" You'd scarce expect one of my age, 
To speak in public on the stage," 

which was first published in the " Columbian Orator." It was written 
by David Everett, who taught the grammar school in New Ipswich in 
1790, for a bright little fellow of seven years to speak at an exhibition of 
his school. This little fellow was the son of the minister of New 
Ipswich, Rev. Stephen Farrar. His name was Ephraim H. Farrar. At 
the centennial of the settlement of New Ipswich, in 1850, this same 
youth, now an old man, stood gravely up before the multitude assembled 



68 PROCEEDINGS. 

on that occasion, and in a weak and broken voice, repeated once again 
after an interval of sixty years, the first two lines, 

" You'd scarce expect one of my age, 
To speak in public on the stage." 

His manner and tone excited a hearty burst of laughter in the audi- 
ence, a few of whom had heard him in his first delivery. 

As published in the "Columbian Orator," which was printed in 
Massachusetts, two lines were altered. 

" Mayn't Massachusetts boast as great 
As any other sister state ? " 

were originally written, 

" Mayn't New Hampshire boast as great 
As any other Federal state ? " 

The " Art of Reading" I do not remember very much about. It 
ceased to be used at an early date. " Scott's Lessons," according to my 
best recollections, began to be used about 1815 or 1816. It was a book 
of rather formidable size. Neither the print nor the paper would be con- 
sidered suitable to put into the hands of children of the present time. 
The matter was of a high character and well selected. There were sev- 
eral dialogues in it, which were rendered with spirit at some of our school 
exhibitions. 

Webster's Spelling Book was a rare book, giving the various sounds 
of the letters, explaining the uses of punctuation marks, and containing 
several wood cuts to illustrate some of the more instructive lessons — for 
instance, "The boy on the apple tree stealing apples," "The farmer and 
the judge," "The swallow offering to drive away the swarm of flies from 
the fox," "The milk-maid spilling the milk," "The old cat hanging 
from a hook." 

The story of the boy stealing apples ran thus: An old man found a 
rude boy upon one of his trees stealing apples and desired him to come 
down. But the young sauce-box told him plainly he would not. 
" Won't you ?" said the old man, " Then I will fetch you down." So 
he pulled up some tufts of grass and threw at him. This only made the 
youngster laugh. 

" Well ! well ! " said the old man, " If neither words nor grass will 
do, I will try what virtue there is in stones." The old man pelted him 
with stones and he soon came down and asked his pardon. The moral 
of the story was formerly written at the close. 



PROCEEDINGS. 69 

That old spelling book was the foundation upon which the slender 
fabric of my knowledge was built. I bestowed hours upon it. " See 
how the mower swings his scythe," "The first of April's dawning ray is 
little Lydia's natal day," " When Jack got up and put on his clothes, 
he thought if he could get to the wood he should feel quite well, for he 
thought more of a bird's nest than his book." 

These and like sentiments from the book flit over my memory like 
dreams. They come back again and again till sometimes it almost seems 
that I am again back in the little bright school-house, sixteen feet square, 
with its four glass windows, while in the west side stands the wide yawn- 
ing fireplace, in summer filled with green hemlock and spruce boughs, 
in winter full of wood, with the great blaze roaring up the chimney, and 
here sit around me the companions of my youth, Fanny Batchelder, Eliza 
Blodgett, my sister Mary, my cousin Eliza Jaquith, Alfreda Thompson, 
John B. Wilder, Calvin Wilder, Ann E. Wetherbee, Josiah Wilder, 
Joseph B. Walton, Lyman Spears, Betsy Spears, Polly Batchelder, 
Nathan Perry, Hermon Brown, Lebanon Brown, Polly Blodget, and 
many others whose faces I can recall as they looked sixty, seventy, eighty 
years ago. Nearly all have passed away except Ann E. Wetherbee and 
myself, gone to that bourne whence no traveller returns. Perchance some 
of their descendants here to-day will recognize their names. But I am 
making my letter too long for your time and patience. 

As I lie here on my bed I think of the olden times, and it would be 
no difficult task to go on with my history and tell of manhood and age, 
with their many A'icissitudes, but it would be only an old man's babbling, 
and I forbear. 

My school days will be interesting as showing to the younger genera- 
tion the many changes, improvements since the early days of the century. 
Hoping that your celebration will be a very pleasant occasion, I remain, 

Sincerely yours, 

John S. Bkown. 



Zumbrota, Minn., Aug. 22, 1900. 
Celebration Committee, 

Dear Sirs: — Your welcome letter of the 16th was duly received. 
I should enjoy it very much if I were able to attend the celebration. But 
I cannot. The extreme heat we are having this month nearly prostrates 
me. I have been gaining in strength so that I am able to walk down into 



70 PROCEEDINGS. 

Main street (our principal business street) one block away. I also do 
some light work in the garden. 

I work early in the morning, and in the cool of the day in the 
evening. Will you please send me a copy of the poem by Timothy 
Perry ? 

I hope to see a full account of the celebration. James Farwell 
starts to-day to attend it. Please give my kindest regards to Mrs. C. F. 
Jones and Mrs. A. C. Shepley, schoolmates of mine ; it is a long time 
since we attended school together, in the old brick school-house, — also my 
sisters Abby and Lucy, Mary Jane Lovett and others. Those were pleas- 
ant times and I like to recall them. 

Yours very truly, 

I. C. Stearns. 



218 Park Street, West Roxbury, Boston, Aug. 20, 1900, 
Celebration Committee, 

Dear Sirs : — In responding to your kind invitation respecting the 
one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the organization of our town, I am 
forced to reply, as to several previous requests, that arrangements formed 
before I was aware of the proposed celebration render it impracticable for 
me to be present. 

It would indeed afford me much pleasure to participate in the exer- 
cises of an occasion which draws together the friends of New Ipswich for 
a review of years and events that are gone. 

Our town has a history her sons do well not to forget. Those who 
have known the place during the last two or three decades only, are liable 
not to realize what breadth and potency of influence she has gained for 
herself during the three half-centuries of her life. 

Her religious teachers have been in every continent, and in numer- 
ous and widely scattered portions of our own land. With possibly a 
single exception the old church on the hill has, probably, sent into the 
world more missionaries, ministers, and ministers' wives than any other 
church or town in New Hampshire. Her jurists, educators and artists 
have attained more than national distinction. Her lawyers, physicians 
and musicians have been, and are, among the most eminent in their pro- 
fessions. It is no wonder her sons turn fondly to her, and take pride in 
their ancestral legacy. 

A town with such a history holds in that history an inspiring stim- 



PROCEEDINGS. 71 

ulus for the future. The foundations already laid should be prophetic of 
what the superstructure is to be. 

Let this single thought be my contribution to your celebration — New 
Ipswich: Her noble past will be congruous only with a future strongly 
marked by piety, together with strength and loftiness in social and educa- 
tional endeavor. Sincerely yours, 

Perley B. Davis. 

Thousand Island Park, N. Y., Aug. 20, 1900. 
Timothy Perry, Esq , Brooklyn, N. Y. 

My Dear Mr. Perry : — Your letter reminding me of the approach- 
ing celebration of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of New Ipswich 
and urging my attendance has been forwarded to me from New York. 
I am spending the month of August in the ozonic atmosphere of this 
charming portion of the St Lawrence river, with the family of my daughter, 
Mrs. Henry Hale, seeking much needed rest and mental recuperation. 

Were present circumstances and conditions other and less imperative 
than they are, Mrs. Lawrence and myself could not well stay away from 
this gathering of former residents of the old town. But, as it is, I must 
ask you to present our greetings to old friends who may be present. 

Except when riding through the town in 1839, a passenger in the 
now historic six-horse stage coach then running to Keene, on my way to 
Dartmouth college, a youth of sixteen, I first knew New Ipswich in the 
summer of 1844, when, at the call of the trustees of the then New Ips- 
wich academy, I came to the town to re-open the old school which had 
been for some time closed. The trustees were, as I recall them, Mr. 
Farrar, Esquire Preston, Mr. Joseph Barrett, Rev. Samuel Lee, Mr. John- 
son, and Mr. Thayer — all long since passed away. 

The resuscitated academy came to have an attendance of 125 stu- 
dents in the fall terms, coming from New Ipswich and neighboring and 
more distant towns, an interesting and earnest class of young people, of 
ages from 15 to 20 and even 25 years. Many memories of my associa- 
tion with these students during the next seven years crowd my mind. 
Among these is your connection with the instruction of the school as assist- 
ant pupil, and your brother Chauncey's presiding as judge in a moot court 
held one evening by the literary society of the academy, precursor of his 
subsequent incumbency as judge in the courts of the city of Brooklyn. 

I see, too, coming to me with his father one Monday morning, a 
young lad, to begin his academic studies — his name now long familiar as 



72 PROCEEDINGS. 

that of the head of one of the leading preparatory schools of the century 
—Cecil F. P. Bancroft. 

And Moses T. Runnells, recalling a Sunday noon walk and talk, and 
Perley B. Davis, preachers ; Mary Jane Craigin, William A. Preston, and 
Martin Fisk, teachers ; and a host of others. How I would like to see 
them all : though many of them have passed over to the other side. 

In 1851, I resigned the principalship of the academy. I continued 
educational work and superintendence elsewhere, till the beginning, some 
thirty years ago, of my membership of the educational publishing house 
in New York city in which I now am. 

It was while I was in New Ipswich that I married, as you know, a 
daughter of the town, Johanna P. Thayer. Our happy married life has 
rounded out a half century — July 26th last being our golden anniver- 
sary wedding day. 

One of our two daughters survives ; also nine grandchildren and one 
great-grandchild. 

I much regret that I cannot on next Tuesday be with you and look 
into the faces and shake the hands, for a personal greeting, of pupils and 
old friends who may be in attendance at the reunion. 

Thanking you in advance for such kind service as you may render 
me in the transmission of these greetings, I am always, 

Very sincerely yours, 

Edw^ard a. Lawrence. 
University Publishing Co., 43-47 East 10th St., New York. 
At home, 144 Cleveland St., Orange, N. J. 

Nashua, N. H., Aug. 20, 1900. 
Celebkation Committee, 

Dear Sirs : — I am in receipt of your kind invitation to attend the 
exercises of the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation 
of the town of New Ipswich, and regret very much that circumstances 
beyond my control will prevent my accepting it, as I know it will be a 
most enjoyable occasion. But unfortunately for me, the regular session 
of the probate court at Nashua occurs on the same date, and, alas ! I have 
not the power of being in two places at the same time. 

Please accept my regrets and allow me to express the hope that the 
weather may be auspicious, and that the exercises and ceremonies attend- 
ant upon the occasion may pass off" in the most satisfactory manner, and 
in a way to reflect honor and credit upon the grand record of your old 

and historic township. Very truly yours, 

E. E. Parkek. 



PROCEEDINGS. 73 

REMARKS BY J. L. HILDRETH, M. D., CAMBRIDGE, MASS. 

Ladies and Gentlemen : — Doubtless all of us, after our hearty en- 
joyment of this, the old town's Thanksgiving dinner, will agree with 
Owen Meredith, who said: 

" We may live without poetry, music and art: 
We may live without conscience, and live without heart: 
We may live without friends : we may live without books : 
But civilized man cannot live without cooks. ^ 

He may live without books,— what is knowledge but grieving ? 
He may live without hope,— what Is hope but deceiving ? 
He may live without love,— what Is passion but pining ? 
But where is the man who can live without dining ? " 

What is true of the civilized man in general is peculiarly true of the 
American. Not only can he not live without dining, but he cannot live 
long without dining with somebody. If he is to listen to politics, or busi- 
ness, or social questions, he can do it best with his legs under a table, 
after he has enjoyed the good things which were spread upon it. So, if 
any explanation is needed of the performance we have just been 
through, there are two : the first is that it is an American custom : the 
second is that we were very hungry. 

It would be pleasant, meeting now as we do in these closer and less 
formal relations, to supplement the facts of history which have been 
called to our minds by the orator of the day with personal reminiscences 
of the men and women who have been identified with the town. 

Fifty years ago, the committee first appointed to make the arrange- 
ments for the celebration were : — George Barrett, John Preston, Joseph 
Barrett, Supply Wilson, Francis Prichard, Jeremiah Smith, Isaac C. 
Stearns, William Johnson, Stephen Thayer, Samuel Lee, and Thomas 
Cochran. There was a corresponding committee at Boston consisting of: 
— Hon. Timothy Farrar, N. D. Gould, Samuel Bachelder and Frederic 
Kidder. Later many more were added to this committee. As far as I 
can learn, only three of this long committee are now living, — Mr. Charles 
Wheeler, Isaac C. Stearns, and Roby Fletcher. Mr. Fletcher, who is in 
his ninety-eighth year, is still young in spirit, and we regret exceedingly 
his inability to be with us to-day. 

It is pleasant to remark that the two who prepared the dinner fifty 
years ago, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Greenman, are still with us. Mr. Mur- 
phy is sitting near me; Mr. Greenman did not feel equal to coming. 
When I pressed him to accept the cordial invitation of the committee, he 
made this characteristic reply, "I was born too early for this occasion." 



74 ' PROCEEDINGS. 

Another interesting fact about the dinner which was served fifty 
years ago, although it occurred before the temperance movement had made 
much headway, and at which one thousand and twenty-six sat down, it 
was distinguished for the absence of all intoxicants. 

Several are to speak to you this afternoon, and I know they will 
have much to say that will interest you. There is so much that can be 
said about this good old town — about its beautiful hills and valleys : its 
trees, and brooks, and green meadows ; the sturdy men and women who 
have gone forth from its borders ; its academy with its remarkable history, 
dear to us all. These and many other things I leave to them. 

Let me close by appropriating for New Ipswich the words spoken 
more than fifty years ago, on an occasion like this at Pittsfield, Massa- 
chusetts, by Ur. Holmes : 

" Come back to your mother, ye children, for sharae, 
Who have wandered like truants, for riches or fame. 
With a smile on her face, and a sprig in her cap, 
She calls you to feast from her bountiful lap. " 

At our centennial celebration, September 11, 1850, after the first 
toast, " The day we celebrate, " had been read, the president of the day 
said, " Some fifty years ago, there was a showy muster of the military 
in this town, and a march was composed called " Ipswich Muster, " and 
we proposed it should be revived for this occasion. " It was accordingly 
played by the band. It seems especially appropriate that you should 
listen to it to-day. 

As far as I can learn, no other governor with his military family 
has ever visited this town in his official capacity. We feel highly honored 
by his presence here to-day. He comes fresh from the celebrations of 
"Old Home Week," which he so happily conceived and successfully 
inaugurated. When I called upon him and supplemented your com- 
mittee's invitation, he said, in somewhat of a serious way, that I must 
not expect him to say much. Now that is the usual reply of after-dinner 
speakers, and you must not be misled by it. I shall be much surprised 
if he does not have his pockets full of interesting sayings, and that he 
will be very generous with them before he gets through. 

I take great pleasure in presenting His Excellency, Governor Rollins. 

RESPONSE OF GOV. FRANK W. ROLLINS. 

Felloiv Citizens: — In the speeches which I have made during Old 
Home Week I have tried to embody practical and helpful suggestions to 



PROCEEDINGS. 75 

the people of New Hampshire. I have tried to avoid any attempt at 
oratory or bombast ; and what I purpose to say to you to-day will be a 
continuance in this line. I have adopted for my subject to-day "The 
Home," which is, as has been often said, "the backbone of our rej)ublic"; 
and anything which we can do to beautify and build up the home and 
make it attractive to our children and a place to be remembered, is a ben- 
efit not only to the family but to the state and nation. 

I am going to imagine myself looking about for a country home. 
This is what I would do. The first question would be as to location, and 
I would select it near some lake, pond or river. No country home is com- 
plete without a bit of water in the neighborhood. The child who grows 
up without it has one side of his nature undeveloped. It must also be in 
a rolling country, not flat. It must have a high hill or mountain in the 
background, for its mental and moral effect. I would not want to live 
where I could look out over all the world and look doivn upon everything. 
You must have something to look up to, something to measure things by, 
a standard as it were, — you must have something to hide the beyond, to 
introduce an element of doubt and mystery in the mind. We always 
want to know what the future has in store, what is just behind, beyond 
the hill ; and this is especially true of children. To them the hill or 
mountain covers the mysteries of the wide world, it typifies the veil which 
hides their mature life, and it is the Rubicon which they expect to cross 
when they leave their father's house and plunge into the thick of the bat- 
tle of life. My home must be in a wooded country with frequent patches 
and belts of forest, and by forest I mean the soft woods. Somehow or 
other the hard woods never seem to me to be natural or to constitute a 
forest They always seem to have been planted by man and to be for 
utilitarian purposes. Not that there are not beautiful hard woods, but 
they do not appeal to me in the mass as do the pine, the fir, the spruce 
and the hemlock. 

Now, having made a selection of a location, let us see about the 
house. It must set well back from the street. In other words, there 
must be a goodly piece of land, and I would go where land was cheap 
enough to have a good-sized lot, even if I had to go farther into the 
country and sacrifice some other things. The house must be simple in its 
architecture, having few and strong lines, and not a jumble of roofs, breaks 
and corners. If the house were in a considerable village or town I would 
follow somewhat the lines of the old Portsmouth houses ; but if it were 
to be in the open country or on a village street, I would get it more on 



76 PROCEEDINGS. 

the ground, spread it out, get it closer to the earth. I would build a hip 
or gambrel roof, or a flat one, like the Portsmouth houses, and 1 would 
have wide, hospitable-looking doors. I would be very generous with my 
piazzas but very careful as to where I put them. They must not inter- 
fere with the scheme of the building, nor shut off light from the interior, 
for piazzas are really no part of a house. They are merely an excrescence 
tucked on for our convenience. 

I much prefer open piazzas, or terraces, preferably terraces, around 
the house. Of course they are not suitable for bad weather and they do 
not keep off the sun ; but they are delightful at evening, and give to the 
house an appearance of solidity, — an open air piazza gives the house a 
special dignity. Such terraces should generally be made of brick, or have 
a brick or stone wall around them, and perhaps surrounded by a hedge 
or climbing vines. And, speaking of vines, I do not think that we Amer- 
icans fully appreciate their value, especially here in New England. The 
English people use them to a great extent, and they add much of beauty 
and interest to the community. It is not difficult or expensive to plant 
vines along our walls and fences and against our houses, and in a few 
years the results obtained are magical. One of the best vines for this pur- 
pose is the English ivy, which is a very hardy plant. The woodbine is 
common in New England, and lends itself readily to such purposes. The 
Virginia creeper also is well suited to stone work. I myself have a great 
partiality for climbing roses, and I especially like to see a wild riot of 
them sweeping up over the front door, all around the front porch or stoop. 

As I have said before, I would put the house well back from the 
street, and I would pay a good deal of attention to the road, or pathway, 
by which the house is approached, giving it graceful curves, making if 
possible a vista of trees or shrubs through which glimpses of the house 
could be seen, providing, of course, that the lot was large enough for such 
purpose. 

I would like to say a few words on the subject of trees. Nothing is 
so beautiful in nature to me as a grand and stately tree. My favorite 
tree is our American elm, with its strong, dignified trunk, its wide- 
spreading, noble top. It is hardy, bold and self-reliant, well suited to 
our climate and our scenery ; and whether they border the village street 
or dot the meadow they are equally beautiful. The next tree which I 
favor is our sugar maple. Shapely, rapid-growing, magnificent in its 
foliage, it seems to thrive best in New England and in the middle states. 
The Norway maple is also well suited for our purposes. A group of 



PROCEEDINGS. 77 

sugar maples upon a lawn is particularly charming. If one wishes to 
see the elm and the maple in their most attractive and beautiful shape 
and grouping, he has onl}' to come to my native city of Concord, where 
these noble trees arch over our roadways, forming long vistas of shade, 
reminding one of some gothic cathedral. I should like very much to see 
a more common use made of the tulip tree, which is well suited to our 
climate and is rapid-growing. I think the magnolia might also be used 
more generally in New Hampsliire, and I am very partial to the old 
Lombardy poplar, with its slender, graceful, spire-like form pointing 
heavenward. A row of these at the rear of a lot is very eftective against 
the sky-line. Fine effects can be produced by the use of many of our 
fruit trees, such as the apple, the peach, and the cherry, particularly in 
the spring when they are in bloom. We have not given enough atten- 
tion to the white birch, the " lady of the woods, " so-called. It is one of 
the most beautiful trees for a lawn imaginable, particularly when you can 
put it against a background of some dark green trees or shrubs. A 
cluster of these white birches produces a fine effect. I came very near 
forgetting my old and dear friend, the lilac. I get more real satisfaction 
out of an old purple lilac in the early summer than out of any other of 
our small trees or shrubs. There is something strengthening and invig- 
orating about the odor of the lilac, and something that carries you back 
to your boyhood. 

I should be very careful as to the color of the paint on my house. 
I should either stain it some soft dark color, somewhat on the reds or 
browns, or a cool gray ; or else I should boldly adopt the old red paint, of 
course with white trimmings, which you see occasionally upon one of our 
old farmhouses or a schoolhouse. I think a good deal is to be said in 
favor of a white house with green blinds, so peculiar to New England. 
It looks very attractive and cool among the deep greens of the country ; 
and if one is in doubt what color to use it is always safe, and is next to 
the dark red the most lasting and enduring paint one can put on. Vines 
and climbing roses are beautifully set off against a white house. The sit- 
uation and surroundings of the house have much to do, of course, with 
the color of the paint. 

It has become quite the custom to do away entirely with fences; and 
in many of our suburban cities and small towns fences are now unknown. 
The primary object of the fence was to mark division lines and to keep 
out stray animals ; but now that cows are always enclosed and not allowed 
to wander about, the object of the fence is largely done away with. I 



78 PROCEEDINGS. 

am going, however, to advocate the return, not to a fence, but to some 
kind of a divisional line or separation of place and lots, not for the pur- 
pose of marking divisions, not to keep out cows, and not because I believe 
in being exclusive, but I do believe that every man is entitled to a little 
privac)' on his own place. I think he wants to be able to wander about 
and pick his flowers, and sit out on his lawn without being subjected to 
the inspection of the whole world. In other words, a little privacy is a 
good thing for everybody, and we are largely doing away with it in our 
good democratic country. There is a sameness about the uninterrupted 
stretch of lawn with here and there a house set down upon it, very tiring 
to the eye. It is human nature to desire to see things which are half 
hidden. The English people are very fond of their homes and of their 
privacy. They surround their places, no matter how small, with a wall 
which it is difficult to look over. I do not know that I am in favor of 
carrying it so far as the English do, but I certainly favor a modified form. 
This wall is built of stone with a fence covered with vines on top of it, or 
else it is built of brick. Frequently it is simply a high hedge, which, of 
course, answers the same purpose, and is, perhaps, more beautiful. I 
should advocate a more general use of these hedges, walls and evergreen 
screens. They serve another purpose besides that of privacy, — they form 
an eff"ective background against which to train shrubs and trees, and along 
which to plant flower gardens, and are the greatest addition to the land- 
scape. W-alls are worth having for their own intrinsic beauty, and not 
simply because they shut off" one's place from the public ga/e. A very 
pretty effect can also be obtained by wire lattice- work, covered with vines. 
" A fruit tree in bloom, just showing over the top of the garden wall, the 
breath of the lilac wafted from behind the hedge, or a short vista through 
the garden gate of a winding path and thick brick walls against which a 
row of hollyhocks are peacefully blooming, make an exquisite picture." 
I would lay out somewhere at the rear of the place, and shut off 
from the public view by a hedge or a wall where it is absolutely secluded 
and quiet and peaceful, an old-fashioned garden, with gravel paths, and 
either a box border or a turf border around the beds. What could be 
more restful and more peaceful than one of those old colonial gardens way 
back behind one of our old New England homes ? I would have it, if 
possible, sunk a little below the general level of the surrounding ground, 
or else I would have it on a terrace, with hedges or currant bushes about 
it. Perhaps at the corners I would have some modest-sized tree ; and I 
would have seats, or a summer-house where one could rest and enjoy the 



PROCEEDINGS. 79 

odor of the flowers. A beautiful place for a garden is along the edge of 
a piece of woods, if such a place is obtainable, and of course if it is 
possible to get it near a running brook, and throw a rustic bridge into 
the picture, it is ideal. I would plant my garden with phlox, hollyhocks, 
larkspurs, roses, sunflowers, black-eyed Susans, and I would not forget 
the nasturtiums, asters, pinks, forget-me-nots, and pansies. I would have 
great beds of begonias, petunias, mignonette, and poppies ; and I would 
especially have a bed of spearmint, and some of the other old-fashioned 
herbs. This garden is, of course, the particular province of the house- 
wife ; but it is a splendid place to which a busy, careworn man may 
retire, and it is a particularly delightful place in which to bring up chil- 
dren. The odor of those flowers will last through a lifetime, and is never 
forgotten. 

In planning my home I would have the children in mind. The 
flower garden would be partially for them, and of course there should be 
a vegetable garden, where they could dig and hoe and plant. I should 
put up a martin-house, and try to tempt those beautiful warblers to make 
their home with me. I should also put dove-cotes in the barn ; and it is 
a splendid idea to try to interest the children in bees, and all sorts of 
birds and animals. It teaches them to be kind, careful and attentive, and 
forms the habit of observation. 

Perhaps I have said enough on the subject of what I would do if I 
were to build an ideal home. I might go on and amplify it indeflnitely, 
and others could make suggestions of great value. Of course each one 
has his own idea of what a home should be; but I am sure many of these 
suggestions will appeal to you all. Just one or two points more and I am 
done. I feel that our New England towns and villages might be made 
very much more attractive and furnish pleasure and amusement to their 
own people and to the "stranger within their gates" if they would pay 
more attention to the beauty spots which are about them, frequently un- 
known and uncared for. There is hardly a New England town or village 
or city which is not surrounded by, or has not in its neighborhood, little 
patches of forest, little strips of park-like country, or some eminence or 
cliff" from which a grand view could be obtained, or some pond or lake 
attractive to the eye. My plan is to lay out winding paths to these 
places. They are frequently unknown and inaccessible. It costs scarcely 
anything to mark and lay out such paths : it costs nothing to keep them 
in repair ; and if the entrances to them were marked in some way, and 
what is to be seen at the end of them was pointed out, thousands would 



80 PROCEEDINGS. 

be tempted and drawn into these woodland recesses, and would be bene- 
fitted and uplifted, not only by the physical exercise obtained, but by that 
better hopefulness of life which is inspired by close communion with 
nature. We should do all we can to tempt people into the woods and 
fields, and to get them out of themselves and away from the cares and 
troubles and worries of every-day life. If we can do more of this we 
shall reduce the population of our asylums and sanitariums. 

People in the country have a mistaken notion that they must cut 
away the rough-growing trees and shrubs along the roadside; that the 
road is better cleared up in this way. They are probably unaware that 
our large cities are trying in their parks to produce just this effect of wild- 
ness and roughness by planting these bushes that the country people are 
destroying. Nothing adds so much to the beauty of the road as these 
green walls of rough, variegated bushes and plants. They should be cut 
just far enough to leave the road-bed and a gutter for proper drainage, 
otherwise leave them intact, except here and there where you want to 
make a vista or a view. The ideal road would be, first, a patch of forest, 
then a wild tangle of roadside growth, then an open piece of field or 
meadow land, then the crossing of a brook, or the skirting of a pond, 
thus giving variety of scenery and forming a restful change to the eye. 

The people of every town should be banded together to do away 
with roadside advertising. An effort should be made to prohibit it 

through the legislature. These great advertisements of sarsaparilla, 

or somebody's cherry pectoral, that stare you in the face from every barn 
and fence and which disfigure every rock, are an outrage and reproach. 
It is simply our good nature that permits it. The few dollars which the 
farmer gets for allowing such advertisements on his buildings are more 
than counterbalanced by injury to the landscape, which is after all a 
more valuable asset to him than the small amount he gets from the adver- 
tisement. If the people of a town choose to do it they could make it 
exceedingly unpleasant for any man who comes to decorate their fences 
and buildings in this manner. I would make the air very uncongenial, 
and I believe that a determined eff"ort ought to be started, not only to 
prevent the further disfigurement of our state, but to remove those adver- 
tisements which are already in existence. 

I fear that I have overstepped the bounds in this rambling speech; 
but it may possibly give some suggestion to those in search of a home, or 
it may be of some slight value to those who have homes in which there 
are possibilities for change and improvement. If any suggestion of mine 
shall be of benefit to our people, or our state, I shall be amply satisfied. 



PROCEEDINGS. 81 

I thank you all for the very generous reception which you have given 
me, and I wish to here testify to the abundant hospitality with which I 
have always been treated by the people of the state of New Hampshire. 

The president of the day next introduced John Herbert, Ksq., who 
said in part : 



REMARKS OF JOHN HERBERT, ESQ. 

After-dinner speeches seem to be necessary to complete the order of 
exercises on such an occasion as this; but for myself, after partaking of 
the good things which have been spread before us, I feel somewhat like 
the man who said that he couldn't get access to his intellect: and I sym- 
pathize with the second class of men described by the colored brother in 
his account of creation. He said that God took some clay and formed 
the bodies of men and laid them up against the fence to dry. Then he 
breathed upon them and they moved their eyes a little and showed some 
signs of life. Then he took off the tops of the heads of some and })ut in 
brains, and they started off ready for the duties of life. The others, see- 
ing them start, followed. Hence we have scattered about the world 
descendants of this latter class. But I wish to assure you that none 
were allowed to leave Appleton academy until their brains had been put 
in and well developed. 

A saint of the middle ages u.sed to say that there are four classes 
who seek education : First, those who seek it for curiosity; second, those 
who seek it so that they may be known as wise ; third, those who seek it 
for the money they can gain ; fourth, those who seek it for the good which 
they can do. At Appleton academy, during my term at least, the stu- 
dents were taught that the last should be their purpose, and that by kind- 
ness, sympathy and other aid they should endeavor to make the world 
better and happier. They were also taught that they should not regard 
their daily avocations as simply a means of getting a living, but rather 
as their chosen field in which to serve their fellow-men, and thus learn to 
truly and happily live while getting a living. 

Here also the boys and girls were educated together. Some believe 
that God created the earth and rested. Then he created man and rested. 
Then he created woman, and since then neither God nor man has had any 
rest. Those who advocate the education of young men by themselves do 
so, I presume, because they wish to secure for them their much needed 
rest. * * * I have heard that some men were born tired and sym- 

6 



82 PROCEEDINGS. 

pathize with the Yale student who came to the conclusion that it wasn't 
healthy to study between meals. But if it be true that man has not had 
rest since the creation of women, it is because women are not satisfied to 
see their loved ones live upon a lower plane of motive, thought or action 
than that of which they are capable. We believe that 

" The manly and the maiden mind 
Together grow more bright, refined." 

At old Appleton, also, the boys and girls had an opportunity to learn 

each other's character and disposition, and thereby they were enabled to 

select congenial companions for life, and the man or the woman who seeks 

alone to rise to the highest and the best attainable is like the bird that 

tries to soar heavenward with one wing. They must live and work 

together if they would know the truest and happiest life. True, indeed, 

it is that 

"All who joy would win 
Must share it— happiness was born a twin." 

While the valedictorians of the classes were usually the young ladies, 
I am quite sure that during my administration they were not imbued 
with the spirit manifested by the educated young lady who was once 
asked if she would marry a man inferior to her, and she replied, " I sup- 
pose I shall be obliged to if I marry at all." But from Appleton acad- 
emy many young men and young ladies have gone forth two by two in 
heart, and later they have been united in the happy bond of matrimony; 
and the principles which here they learned became a part of their very 
nerve and life-blood and were thence transmitted to their offspring, so that 
the seed which has been sown in this educational garden has sprung up 
and sent forth many a bud and blossom to cheer, adorn and enrich that 
dearest place on earth — home, sweet home. 

The president next called upon the orator of the day, remarking 
upon his own knowledge of him when they were boys together, and re- 
ferring in a humorous way to his varied lines of early activity, including 
among them the occasional production of poetry. Mr. Chandler responded : 

REMARKS OF PROF. CHARLES H. CHANDLER. 

Mr. President: — I find it necessary to plead guilty to the charge of 
having issued certain crude rhymes with vain attempt to make them pass 
as lawful poetry, since my principal accomplice in that and other irregu- 
larities of former days has turned state's evidence. 



PROCEEDINGS. 83 

But still, sir, I suppose that I must yield as complete a recognition 
of your authority as that which was yielded by a discreet young man 
bearing the unusual name of Jones, to a formal call issued in that part of 
our country which on account of its political aspirations is sometimes 
termed the " United States of Ohio." A leading lawyer of one of the 
cities of that state had an attractive daughter, especially attractive in 
fact to Mr. Jones, and also a younger son who frequently accompanied 
his father to court, and so became somewhat familiar with legal forms. 
It chanced one day that the young lady saw Mr. Jones passing her father's 
residence, and wishing to speak to him. said to her brother, " F'reddie, 
tell George to come in a minute." So Freddie stepped to the door and in 
resonant tones proclaimed, " George Henry Jones, George Henry Jones, 
George Henry Jones, come into court." I need not say that the legal 
summons was duly honored, although I believe that the court crier deemed 
it wise that he should become invisible. 

But now being called upon to add anything to my already too ex- 
tended contribution to the words of the day, I find my condition not un- 
like that of a certain Englishman who met with an unpleasant experience 
upon a railroad train in the newer regions of this country, and afterward 
related how a big, ugly looking revolver was thrust into his face with a 
demand from a fellow of equally unpleasant appearance, for his " money 
or brains," and " 'pon my word," declared the unfortunate victim, " I had 
nothing for him." One thing, however, does remain clearly in my con- 
sciousness, a real desire to urge a more enthusiastic and continuous appre- 
ciation of the line of thought which has so able an advocate in the gover- 
nor of the Granite State, and to advocate a true local loyalty, a condition 
as reasonable and as essential to the welfare of rural communities as an 
earnest orator once asserted a like feeling to be to the national welfare, 
when he said, " Patriotism is the back-bone of the British empire; and 
what we have to do is to nurse that back-bone and bring it to the front." 

The Civil war taught this land the lesson of the supremacy of the 
nation, sadly needed fifty years ago. But the glorious resultant broaden- 
ing of patriotism and the increased appreciation of the worth of distant 
sections of our country have often tended unduly to an unconscious exalta- 
tion of those sections, with an unfortunate undervaluing of the present 
conditions of ancestral homes. The recently awakened interest in gene- 
alogical study marks a reaction against the feeling formerly prevalent that 
such research is characteristic of snobs. It is a just reaction; for, if we 
are worthy of our ancestry, there is due a recognition of that which we 
have received by heredity. 



84 PROCEEDINGS. 

Too often the unconscious bias extends to an approval of possibly un- 
desirable changes because of their novelty, as was shown by an Eastern 
boy's message from the West to his father remaining at home, suggested 
by the new experience of judicial elections by vote, in place of the appoint- 
ments of the ICast. "This is a great place, father," he wrote, "come 
out here and perhaps you will get to be a justice of the peace. They 
make justices of the peace out of dreadful mean men out here." 

Changes are not necessarily improvements. There is a place and a 
worthy place, for a fuller and a more comprehensive appreciation of the 
merits, of the strength, of the abiding power and usefulness of the old 
familiar New England virtues. There may be need of a due discretion 
and care lest the typical Yankee persistence come into evidence in support 
of local peculiarities hardly more weighty than moved a citizen of the 
New Ipswich of 1800, when an unfortunate difference of taste caused a 
disagreement between this member of one of the families no longer on our 
roll and his worthy wife, who chanced to prefer shelled green beans to 
those of the stringed variety, and declined to assent to her husband's 
views of the superior excellence of the last named article of food, even 
though, as entirely reliable tradition reports, he assured her with very 
emphatic allusion to her ignorance, that she was mistaken in believing 
that her preference was as she asserted, because, "everybody likes string 
beans best." That was not a type of true local loyalty. It is possible 
to recognize the excellencies of other homes than this, cordially to accept 
other customs, heartily to unite with other communities, while loyally 
and strenuously maintaining the reputation and memories of our early 
home with an enthusiasm which ought to be ever hereafter more pro- 
nounced and joyous because of the experiences and memories of this day. 

The Temple Quartette of Boston sang after Prof. Chandler's speech. 

The president of the day referred to a Boston merchant, whose 
patrons were reminded of their indebtedness by the receipt of his monthly 
statements, and then said, " I will introduce the Hon. R. H. Stearns." 

The venerable gentleman arose and said, "Mr. President, this intro- 
duction has been a first-class advertisement of my business, for which I 
thank you." He reverted in a fond vein of reminiscence to his youthful 
days passed here, while he resided in Davis Village and attended school 
* in that neighborhood. He mentioned his first visit to the circus, the boy's 



PROCEEDINGS. 85 

delight and pleasure. Instead of possessing the characteristics of the 
Father of his Country, he said, " I could tell a lie, but wouldn't." 

Revisiting and reviewing the scenes of his boyhood days, he spoke 
of his first impressions of the district school, which was located near 
Davis Village, and most kindly mentioned one of his teachers, Miss 
Miranda Adams, who afterwards became Mrs. William D. Locke. His 
closing remarks embodied a gentle repartee to the medical fraternity. 



POEM BY MISS ELIZABETH LINCOLN GOULD OF BOSTON. 

Mrs. Hattie P. McKown read the following verses : 

Long years ago there lived a sage — 

I can't recall his name or age — 

Who said, "Now size, to my surprise, 

Of vahie is no gauge ; 

In packages exceeding small 

One has to look for nearly all 

The priceless things that Fortune brings 

On this terrestrial hall." 

The sage returned, as sages must 

In time, like all of us, to dust ; 

But his remark, a living spark, 

Remained to be discussed. 

And all who've gathered here must see 

The sage's wisdom, and agree 

His words, though few, were very true, 

And should immortal be. 

Upon the map this little town 

Seems scarcely worth the putting down ; 

Its tiny space might hold a place 

Of very slight renown ; 

And yet its fame has spread afar ; 

The natives down in Zanzibar 

For all we know, may try to show 

Their children where we are. 

Whene'er you see a model man. 
Who's built on Nature's noblest plan. 
You'll lind he claims New Ipswich names 
As many as he can. 
Perchance his uncle's grandma went 
To school here — or his cousin spent 
With distant kin, a summer in 
Our village, well content. 

We try our modesty to keep. 
And lull our righteous pride to sleep. 
While feeling still a pleasant thrill 
Of conscious worth, down deep. 



86 PROCEEDINGS. 

Singers have sung, musicians played 
As children lie re ; and some are laid 
To rest at last, life's music past. 
Beneath our sun and shade. 

The old academy has trained 

Some minds that aren't to he disdained, 

Whose native wit has made them fit 

For eminence attained. 

Our district schools have sent away 

The children, far and near to stray ; 

Science and Art have had their part 

In all the after-play. 

Both law and letters have their share ; 

Ask a lu'ight light in either, where 

He learned to read ; his answer heed. 

And note it down with care. 

And medicine her portion took 

From those who here were brought to book, 

Willing or not-- and sometimes got 

Their tasks by hook or crook. 

Theology both broad and sound, 
Culture and wisdom most profound. 
With us began their course, and ran 
For many miles around. 
And though as yet, no President 
Directly from us has been sent, 
Our influence has been immense. 
And freely has been lent. 

Our 'scutcheon is without a blot, 
We hold a highly favored spot. 
Our air is pure, our quiet sure, 
And though it is our lot 
To see our sons and daughters go, 
An explanation we can show : 
'Tis only they who go away 
Who can come back, we know! 

John Preston was introduced and responded: 



REMARKS OF JOHN PRESTON. 

We have gathered to-day to set the third golden milestone in our 
town's history. 

It is unnecessary for me to recall to your minds the names inscribed 
on the first post, for the blood of those brave, earnest pioneers runs 
through your veins ; and their memory is still as green as is the laurel on 
their native hills. Nor must I read the roll of their grandchildren, whose 
names are written on the second milestone. They are the names of your 
fathers and your mothers, whose thrift and energy have made our town 



PROCEEDINGS. 87 

known from one end of the state to the other. New Hampshire was the 
clasp that bound the states into a union ; and our honored Timotliy Karrar 
was a strong factor in bringing about the action of our state. 

The New Ipswich company stood its ground at the rail fence during 
the battle of Bunker Hill, and four flags in one family lot in our church- 
yard show that New Ipswich courage had not abated as late as 1860. 

As it was the boast of an old German city that Nuremburg's hand 
reached through all. the world, so New Ipswich, too, can look with pride 
to her boys scattered over the world, successful as merchants, artists, 
clergymen and lawyers, and, like the Roman Cornelia, exclaim, "These 
are my jewels." " Not wholly in the busy world nor quite beyond it lies 
this garden that we love." The hills embrace it as warmly as in the 
days of our youth. As we wander through the village streets and renew 
old friendships we thank God that we are once more at the Old Home. 

"Happy he whom neither wealth nor fashion, 
Nor the march of the encroaching city, 

Drives an exile 
From the liearth of his ancestral homestead. 

We may build more splendid habitations, 

Fill our rooms with paintings and with sculptures, 

But we cannot 
Buv with srolil the old associations." 



REMARKS OF REV. CECIL F. P. BANCROFT, LL. P., OF ANUOVKR, MASS. 

Mr. Presidevt : — When you invited me to speak at this festival I 
answered that I would not, whereupon you wrote in reply thanking me 
for my prompt acceptance of your invitation and intimating that ten 
minutes was a proper time limit. After flatly refusing I am now really 
accepting. This shows that I am a good patient of yours and take my 
medicine like a little man. 

The chief reason why I declined to speak to-day was that on Sunday 
I had the honor to participate in the service at the church, and in my 
address there I spoke briefly of the work and worth of our forefathers, 
and the good repute of this town, — the birthplace and home of so many 
of us here assembled. My voice has also been heard this morning. But 
I cannot forbear to say a word of the beautiful family life, and what I 
conceive to have been the great hajipiness of our forefathers, whom we 
sometimes think of as so pressed by privations and hardships, and so ex- 
posed to peril and harrassed by fears that they had little comfort and joy. 
They came here, however, not to escape political oppression or religious 



88 PROCEEDINGS. 

persecution, not as exiles or fugitives, not quite as adventurers like those 
who flocked to ('alifornia in 1847 and to Alaska in 1897, but it is fair 
to them to say that they came in order to better their condition. The 
spirit of thrift and of enterprise was in them, and I venture to say that 
they brought great contentment and happiness as well as great courage 
and fortitude with them. It is easy to represent their faith as narrow 
and their manners as uncouth and austere, to pity them for their occa- 
sional superstition and their habitual bigotry, but their convictions had 
both warmth and glow. If their theology was hard, their religion was 
tender. They had intense family aff'ection, friendly neighborly interests, 
a large public spirit, and they served God with thanksgiving and rejoicing 
as well as with penitence and j;odly fear. They did their rugged duty 
with an honest will, and I believe that they had in their successful strug- 
gle here a great tide of wholesome happiness. Civilization is not in 
goods, in luxuries, in superfluities, but in ideas, in moral worthiness, in 
right conduct. It is in character, organization, and outlook. These our 
fathers had, both in church and state, in public affairs and in happy 
homes. A man may wear tan shoes and part his hair in the middle, and 
be a barbarian. Our fathers did not have what we, largely through their 
efforts, now enjoy, but they had the empire of character, a wealth con- 
stituted of the satisfactions of a good conscience and a pure love. I 
quoted from St. Paul this morning the phrase, " whose are the fathers." 
The fathers are indeed ours. It is for us to be as strenuous, patriotic, 
sagacious, and devout as they, so that we may as confidently say that we 
are theirs. 

This concluded the exercises of the day. 



PROCEEDINGS. 89 

CLOSING REMARKS. 

Several of the visitors, who were highly entertained during the 
celebration exercises, left substantial tokens of their interest in the welfare 
of this community as well as proofs of their appreciation of the efforts of 
the president of the board of trustees of the New Ipswich library, an 
institution that has done very much in the past decade to educate, enter- 
tain and develop the best thought in this community. The New Ips- 
wich library needs an endowment of at least $10,000. Then it would 
be placed upon a basis of strength fortified by annual dividends which 
would ensure its independence. The citizens have made noble appropria- 
tions at the annual town meetings for the purchase of books and the main- 
tenance of the library, and private subscriptions have also been donated 
by many interested persons. 

Hon. Isaac Spalding's gift of $10,000 to the public schools a few 
years ago, the annual income of which is to be devoted to their aid, was 
a most generous contribution to a most worthy object, and will perpetuate 
his memory as a philanthropist. 

Capt. Albert Stearns, superintendent of the Church & Co. soda 
works of Syracuse, N. Y., established a noble memorial of his munifi- 
cence when he presented the town with his check for $3,000, to estab- 
lish a perpetual fund, the income of which is to defray the expenses of 
maintaining annually a course of free non-sectarian lectures. 

The Congregational, Baptist and Methodist churches, and New 
Ipswich Appleton academy have in former years received worthy gifts 
from their admirers, and their records show the names of many benefac- 
tors, who were either natives of the town or became interested in its 
prosperity. 



90 PROCEEDINGS. 



GOVERNOR'S RECEPTION. 

" Now as evening shadows gather, 

And we're called upon to part, 
May the warm hand-clasp be taken, 

Of the love heart bears to heart; 
Kindly wishes, thought or spoken. 

Drop as blessings or as balm, 
And the meni'ry of this season 

E'er be hallowed with a charm." 

The governor's reception, held in town hall Tuesday evening at 
eight o'clock, attracted a large number of elegantly dressed ladies and 
gentlemen. Gov. Rollins and his military staff stood in front of the plat- 
form, while J. L. Hildreth, M. D., presented each person to His Excel- 
lency as the ushers escorted them and announced their names. 

The hall was beautifully decorated and brilliant lights enhanced the 
general effect of the lavish display of bunting. 

After the reception a grand ball was held. The Worcester orchestra 
occupied the platform and discoursed pleasing strains of music. 

Gov. Rollins and Mrs. Hattie P. McKown led the opening march, 
and were followed by nearly one hundred couples. Edward O. Marshall, 
general director, in his usual courteous manner exerted himself to close 
the day's celebration to the gratification of all present. His aids were 
Fred Preston, Ralph E. Parker, Edward R. Wheeler and Charles A. 
Preston, who heartily co-operated with him. 

Musical selections were rendered during the evening by the Temple 
Quartette of Boston. 

During the entire evening a throng of people were entering and 
departing from the town hall, and the gay crowds on the streets 
temporarily gave the impression that the town was quite a populous 
center of beauty, wealth and enterprise. 

In one corner of the hall at the right of the stage special chairs were 
arranged for the use of His Excellency and friends, while the surround- 
ings were made attractive for the distinguished guest. 

The sight of the galaxy of beauty afforded to those in the gallery 
was entrancing, as the devotees of Terpsichore threaded the mazy dance 



PROCEEDINGS. 91 

or assembled in animated groups and discussed the pleasures of the day. 
Old associations were cemented anew and the cordial grasp of the hand 
of friendship awakened new interest in the observance of such occasions. 

Persons were present from Mason, Greenville, Temple, l^ast Jaffrey, 
Lyndeboro, Wilton, Peterboro, Rindge, Hancock, Dublin, N. H., Ashby, 
Boston, Mass., New York, Minnesota, Illinois and other places. 

" Long, long be my heart with such memories filled ! 
Like the vase in which roses have once been tlistilled — 
You may break, you may ruin the vase, if you will, 
But the scent of the roses will hang round it still." 



